Missives from the 6th Floor

First, I had to figure out what the problem with the notebook was - and turning it on made that pretty obvious. It had hibernated, and between hitting the power switch and the machine being interactive was a good 90 seconds.

Then came the wonderful several minutes where all the various apps on the system with auto-update behaviors realized they hadn't checked in with mother ship for several weeks and proceeded to fork bomb the machine.

Once I had the machine patched, and rebooted from said patching (elapsed time - 15 minutes) I closed the lid, putting it to sleep, and reopened it.

And waited.

Not long, in the grand scheme of things, but longer than I should have.

Some of the delay was hardware, some of it was software, and most of it could be solved by a MacBook or MacBook Pro - which wakes from sleep nearly instantly and reliably (accomplished by tightly integrating the hardware and software).

But the cheapest MacBook is twice the price of an iPad. So it seemed prudent to check out the iPad first.

It's like an iphone - only bigger - and with bigger comes some added expectations - only some of which it lived up to.

The first thing we noticed is that the lack of user-profiles meant it's really a single-user device. There's no way to have both our email on the device without trivially giving each-other access. There's no way to select the set of visible apps (or the order in which they're presented) based on who's using the device.

This makes the cost comparison harder - as I suspect we'd quickly probably want his-and-hers, whereas we'd be happy with a single MacBook and fast user switching. But the clamshell design significantly increases the friction involved in using a device.

To be sure, the time scales we're talking about are tiny - but human perception and habit are funny things, and often can't be rationalized away.

The second failing Dawnise quickly noticed was that the iPad can't print.

She used Safari to find a recipe she wanted to make and - being conscious of the fact that the device is expensive and fragile, not to mention borrowed - she sensibly wanted to print a copy to put on the counter while cooking, rather than endanger the iPad proper.

So she hit the print link on the page she was browsing and wandered into the office to wait for the hard copy. When nothing materialized in a moment or two - and neither printer was warming up - she innocently asked "how do I print?"

Turns out the answer is, you don't. (yet?).

This despite the fact that our Macs (running much of the same OS software stack the iPad is) both saw one of our printers "automagically" thanks to Bonjour.

Aside from that - the device does everything an iphone does, except make calls. And it does it with the polish and ease of use people have come to expect from Apple consumer products.

Perhaps the key takeaway from the experience is that it's not (just) a better netbook, or the first "good" tablet computer - it's not even the first "good" MID. One could argue that it's more of a "better television" - it's a device to consume on, not to create on - but really, I think any of those comparisons mostly miss the point.

The iPad is the computing device that most people want - and with a few software (multiple "profiles" - so a family can share it) and hardware (camera, at least front-facing for video chat) tweaks - it very well could be the only computing device most people need.

The missing link, to me, is that Apple doesn't seem to really "get" the network.

That setting up an iPad requires a Mac or PC with iTunes is a failure of blink-tag proportions. The iPad is so nearly the cloud computing device - there should be no need for anything other than the device in the box and access to the 'net.

But then, given the sad and sorry state of "mobile me" ($100 a year for services Google offers me free?) it's hardly surprising it is the way it is.

Sure it doesn't have (much) local storage - but it shouldn't need it. You've got a Time Capsule, right? Well, once you're not backing up a Mac, what are you going to use all that space for? As a local cache of data from the cloud, of course.

Yes, it's a walled garden - but as much as the software engineer in me hates that, and has no interest in writing software to such a platform - it's hard to argue against the net result. In many real and meaningful ways, Apple is making computing easier and more effective for people.

So I expect we'll end up with one, eventually - though a 72 hour test drive failed to instill me with a feeling of "must have." It felt close, but if I'm going to pay the Apple tax on a bit of hardware, it's gotta get a little bit closer.