“This note speculates about the emergence of personal, portable information manipulators and their effects when used by both children and adults. Although it should be read as science fiction, current trends almost guarantee that many of the notions discussed will actually happen in the near future.” — Alan C. Kay, 1972
If you are interested in how the future is made, this is a worthwhile read. I’m betting at least few people at Apple did.
I know this seems like a really stupid question, but does anyone think Microsoft would ever make iPad apps of the individual Office tools? At first I thought there’d be no way — Microsoft has a competing mobile OS, why would they want to enable that? Then I remembered they also have a competing desktop OS and they deliver to that. With Apple releasing iWork apps for $10.00 each for the iPad I wonder if Microsoft will be inspired to create somewhat lighter weight versions of Word, PPT, and Excel? Perhaps one of the motivations Apple had for doing the iPad versions of iWork was to press Microsoft into playing?
The really funny thing for me is that I don’t care. I stopped using Office for anything of any sort a long time ago. If you send me a Word doc it is instantly converted to a Google Doc — and I know that’ll continue to work on the iPad. I just wonder if Microsoft will be willing to let money just sit out there in the cloud? Sorry, I was just thinking out loud.
Gadgets potentially replaced by iPad:
That’s almost $2,000.00 worth of stuff that could be replaced — essentially 4 iPads, one for every member of my family. I struggled with throwing the MacBook in that list as it is a full fledged computer, but I was thinking about who in my house would be happy with a MacBook and the only one two I came up with are my 8 year old daughter and 3 year old son. Watching the way each of them use Macs leads me to believe that either would be very satisfied with an iPad (until they hit a site that required Flash). Even without the MacBook, the fact of the matter is that this thing may end being seen everywhere at only $500.00.
I just thought I’d take a minute to remind everyone that Apple is a consumer electronics company. They, unlike lots, do really good things for education (see the ADE initiative, iTunes U, Apple Learning Interchange, and others) but first and foremost they are selling products to people. Lots of us in the higher ed space are looking at the iPad lamenting the stuff that didn’t make it … but at the end of the day it is a really nice product in the consumer space that will evolve.
It might be a hit at my house and if it is, it will cost us a heck of a lot less than a laptop for each of the kids. The only thing that would keep it from being something I’d heavily promote is that at the moment it lacks any sort of real digital content creation tools — and that may be one of its biggest short comings out of the box. We know from our own surveys and national data that kids are creating lots of shareable digital media. How does the iPad fit into that World? I am hoping Apple will do the same thing with some of the iLife apps as it has with iWork — port them to iPad. Imagine an iPad with iMovie or Garageband on it … it would be an amazing UI opportunity. The current inability to do native (read as the Apple way) content creation on the iPad is an oversight.
Having iWork on the device makes it something I can easily take on trips and potentially present from … I say “potentially” because most of my Keynote stacks are heavily laden with digital video. I am guessing Keynote on the iPad can manage all that stuff. That integration alone makes it a great business tool for me. I use Safari, Keynote, Gmail, and Google Docs for more than 90% of my work so the iPad fits my profile. Looking at it, the horizon is unlimited because of the App Store. How long will it be until people start building apps that really take advantage of the form factor and meet business needs?
I am guessing that the iPad will fit into most peoples’ lives. Will everyone in my house have an iPad? I am guessing that is what Apple is hoping for … I didn’t see anything that said the iPad can have multiple accounts running on it. From what I can see is that the iPad and its owner have a 1:1 relationship. A Macbook can be shared, while it looks like the iPhone in that it is a single user device.
No matter, we’ll be testing it. I feel like there are enough interesting aspects of this thing that we need to understand it and its potential relationship to teaching and learning.