Getting excited about the iPad
I’m critical by nature. When I first saw the iPad I was no better than Bill Gates (“this thing will bomb”). But as I’m pushing my iMac, Air and iPhone to their limits I realize that there is a nice little need for something in-between. It’s more vision than routine which makes it hard to get your head around this new thang.
One of my buddies - ex-technical Yahoo! - painted a sweet picture today during lunch. It’s not the e-reader I’m excited about, it’s the doc reader, he said. Which is so true. It’s Byline for PDF’s with Diigo. Cached during flights to digest, highlight, annotate and share. Accelerated thinking and collaboration.
It’s both business and digital living room. It’s realtime on the cheap ($15 for 250MB). It’s cloud + apps + entrepreneurialism. It’s not just what it can do but what you’ll use it for.
I wouldn’t have realized this if I hadn’t kicked the shit out of my old iPhone with Travels with iPhone. And it’s ironic that it’s called an iPhone as the phone is what I never use. And I wouldn’t have realized it if I wasn’t working independently, defining how and when I work.
Sure, you can use these new gadgets in the old context and they will deliver incremental value or you could let it free and see where it takes you. New hardware and software is not just about what it can do for you but what you can do that you couldn’t before in your quest for world domination.
I’m more and more certain that the driver behind this technology evolution is our desire for friends, freedom and thought (a little Seneca there for ya). It’s meritocratic marxism. It’s lifestyle design.
