By
Larry M. Elkin
I was a skeptic when Apple introduced the iPad in the spring of 2010.
It was immediately clear that this would be a hot-selling item, but
tablet computers were not new and had never been more than a niche
product.
So
I wondered what, exactly, most people would do with the new gadget. I
thought there was a pretty good chance those sleek new machines would
end up gathering dust like so many old boom boxes, unable to match the
power of fully equipped computers or the convenience of
ever-more-capable smart phones.
I am not going to say, "I hate to
say I told you so... " First of all, I have enough chutzpah to write an
opinion column, and you can rest assured that despite their denials,
opinion columnists love to say "I told you so." It's called attribution
bias. When we're right, it proves how smart we are. When we're wrong, it
proves that the world has gone crazy. (Remember this principle the next
time you hear someone predict what the stock market will do in the next
six months.)
The second and major reason I am not going to say "I
told you so" is that the world has gone crazy over the iPad. Some 55
million devices were sold through the end of 2011, according to Time. It
seems entirely possible that Apple will sell that many again in 2012 -
bringing the total well over 100 million devices by the end of this
year.
They can't all be gathering dust in our closets. We don't have enough closet space.
My
wife owns one of those iPads. She got it not long after I wrote my
column questioning what to do with it. My wife happens to be the
executive in charge of marketing at my firm. The main reason for buying
the device, or so we told ourselves, was that it would let her
familiarize herself with the hardware platform and the various
applications for it, so we would understand how to use tablets in our
business.
As it turned out, the iPad was very good for playing
various Scrabble-type games. My wife is a word-game barracuda. She's got
around five games going simultaneously pretty much all the time, and
she has a fleet of machines - two laptops, a smartphone and her iPad -
to help her keep up.
Lately I have started borrowing her iPad. I
was working at our home in New York recently when a storm knocked out
our cable company's internet service. The iPad's 3G internet service on
AT&T's network allowed me to log back on to my office computer and
resume my work. The connection was slower, and it was not easy to work
without my accustomed keyboard, but I was able to stay productive during
a three-hour outage that otherwise would have forced me offline.
More
often, I use the iPad as a substitute for my latest defunct Kindle
e-reader. I have a Kindle subscription to The Wall Street Journal, which
is convenient because I travel frequently and would get little use from
a daily newspaper delivery. I like to read The Journal while I spend my
customary daily hour on the elliptical machine in an endless battle
against the bodily effects of travel and age.
I like technology,
but I usually refrain from change just for the sake of change. If
something works for me, I tend to stay with it. So when the iPad came
out, I saw no reason to stop using my Kindle, which worked.
Except
that the Kindle stopped working. And so did another, and another. I'm
not a heavy or heavy-handed user, but my devices kept breaking. First,
the selector button on the large-screen Kindle DX literally broke in
half. This is the button that acts like a joystick, allowing the user to
move the cursor and select items off the menu. For a long time I tried
just squeezing the fractured halves together, as I was in no hurry to
inject glue into my out-of-warranty machine, but eventually I gave up
and moved to another device.
That one developed a crack near the
USB port into which the charger is plugged. I became an expert at
jiggling the charger cord and balancing the apparatus ever-so-carefully,
but that got tiresome and eventually stopped working, too.
The
next Kindle, which another family member had had for some time but never
used, just died. It simply refused to wake up one day, like a body that
had reached the end of its biological time clock. There are steps one
should take in that situation. I took them without results. Finally I
administered the last rites and contemplated getting yet another Kindle.
I
can still get the "Kindle keyboard," as the older-fashioned machines
are now known, or I could get the newer Kindle Fire - which is a tablet
modeled very much along the lines of the iPad, but with less software
flexibility. It's just a question of whose ecosystem I prefer to join,
Apple's or Amazon's. As a heavy Apple user in the rest of my computing
life, I am not in a big hurry to make my life more complicated while
still ending up with the same class of device.
So I am
experimenting with the Kindle app on my wife's iPad. I can get my
Journal, and it's easier to read on the tablet's bigger, brighter,
higher-contrast color screen. I find it is not a problem to turn pages
with my finger, even when I am exercising. I do not have Amazon's free
The transition is not without cost. I
particularly liked the Kindle's ability to save a Journal article in a
"clippings" file with just a simple command. I used the clippings file
to store stories that might be the nucleus of a future commentary
column. The iPad app for the Kindle does not support clippings. It
allows user-selected highlights to be stored, but I haven't got the hang
yet of highlighting and storing things while I pump away on the
elliptical.
But the bottom line is that, even as I type this
column on my laptop's QWERTY keyboard (like the one on the Royal 440
manual typewriter on which I learned touch-typing more than 40 years
ago), I have to recognize that keyboards are going away. They are
vanishing from smartphones, as Blackberry maker RIM is discovering to
its corporate sorrow. They are vanished from tablets, and the day is
probably coming when most computers will incorporate touch screens and
voice recognition, with vestigial keyboards that will eventually wither
away.
Maybe I was right all along, and 100 million iPad buyers are
wrong. It doesn't matter. Since we can't fit all those iPads in our
closets, we're just going to have to use them. I might as well get used
to it.
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