There’s been a ton of press about the 10th anniversary of the iPad announcement. Most of the Apple blogosphere has been about its current unrealised potential.
I have owned iPad from 2012 (iPad 3, 9.7″ iPad Pro, 2018 12.9″ iPad Pro) and have used them extensively at work and home. The iPad has been my most-used machine for years now.
Apple nailed the form factor, the size, the weight distribution – right from the start. It feels like it was made to be propped up to, watch Netflix. But it feels equally at home in your hands, browsing and reading as Steve did in the Le Corbusier chair on stage. And it is just as natural a digital slate placed face-up on a desk to write and draw on.
And there is an incredible variety of software made for the iPad. Procreate for art, Pixelmator for image manipulation, Notability for illustrations and note-taking, Mindnode for mind mapping, Reeder for RSS feeds, Fantastical for calendaring, the entirety of the Omni Group’s products like OmniFocus, and so many many more.
Much of the criticism is about the iPad not being enough like a regular computer – for example, lack of support for pointing devices and for an escape key, for more keyboard shortcuts, for a file app that more resembles the Mac OS Finder. But I don’t want the iPad to resemble a laptop. Arguably it’s least appealing when it’s propped up in laptop mode.
Touch is a totally different way to interact with information, and more software should embrace it. The iPad already has support for deep drag and drop, for window manipulation. Pinch, swipe and twist have been around from the start, as has software support for the accelerometer and gyroscope. The Apple Pencil has pressure and tilt sensitivity and now a double-tap gesture, and iOS supports markup throughout the system. Let’s make more software that embraces these primitives.
The iPad is absolutely a personal computer. It is also the archetype for computers of the next decade, maybe two. Let’s start building software for the future.