SOMETIMES it's best to start with the obvious. The
"new" iPad announced on Wednesday will sell like mad when it goes on
sale next Friday. So confident is Apple in what it isn't calling the iPad 3
that it didn't even bother to give it a special name. It's just iPad, even though
there is a first-generation iPad (a retronym, of course) and an iPad 2.
When you've achieved one-name status - Bono, Cher, Liberace
- you don't give that up lightly.
The new iPad has a bunch of hardware and design upgrades
that do make sense, even though the impetus for incorporating them may or may
not have been to play catch-up with some Android tablets that nobody is buying.
It's nice to see 4G make its first appearance on an Apple
device - one wonders why this wasn't possible on the iPhone 4S that came out
not that terribly long ago. This exponentially better network standard isn't
widely available yet, but where it exists it spoils you quickly.
Better camera, new iSight on the back, HD video, retina
display, quad-core graphics acceleration, check, check and double-check.
But it all seems so... predictable. The immensely insightful
Sharah Rottman Epps said of the new iPad: “A Gut Renovation Masquerades As
Incremental Innovation,” and she's not someone you disagree with lightly.
Yet there's no magic in this newness. Apple really is only
shoring up a sure thing with features first introduced by considerably less
successful competitors and Apple itself on other devices.
I was hoping, especially in the first big product rollout of
the post-Jobs era, for One Last Thing from the Jobs era. Instead of surprising
us with an unpredictable Bobby Fischer-like sequence of moves to win, this
update feels like Apple is playing for a draw.
Why not, one might argue. Apple really doesn't have anything
to prove right now. The iPad already has the kind of market share in tablets
that Google, which is virtually synonymous with search, has in search.
I was hoping for something entirely different from Tim Cook,
whose black shirt was in keeping with the Jobs tradition, but whose preference
for a collar - albeit not buttoned up - was perhaps a modest declaration of
independence.
My chief lament: no Siri, the imperfect but powerful
voice-controlled personal assistant introduced in the iPhone 4S. Porting Siri
to the iPad and granting app developers access to it would have been insanely
great.
But I'm biased, having been seduced by her charms. Even more
than the iPhone, the iPad is becoming basic kit in every industry - the
military, aviation, medicine, restaurants, retail.
Reliable voice control is such a powerful force multiplier
that Apple wouldn't even have to hype it much to make the case that it's the
most important development in computing since the mouse - and infinitely more
versatile.
Apple usually either produces something insanely great, or
makes us believe - through that famous Jobsian reality distortion field - that
it has. But the new iPad is handsome and respectable and admirable. It's not a
rebel.
That doesn't mean Apple has got fat and lazy as it rolls
around in piles of cash and watches its stock price reliably test historical
levels day after day. But the iPad event was sobering instead of intoxicating.
"Sanely great" just doesn't have the same ring to
it.
- Reuters
* John C Abell is the New York bureau chief for Wired.