Fri, Jan 29, 2010 9:13 AM
Many years ago there was a catalog of novelty items based around the infamous Chickenboy, a large statue of an anthropomorphic chicken marking a restaurant in Los Angeles.
The slogan for the catalog was, "Too tall to live, too weird to die". See for yourself:
Before we get to the point of this post, it may be helpful to remember exactly what "weird" means: "involving or suggesting the supernatural". Regardless how people use it, "weird" can be a good thing. A very good thing. Keep that in mind as we go forward here:
So last night I was pondering Apple's premier of their new iPad as I walked past a cafe, and I noticed nearly a dozen people inside with their laptops open, almost half using netbooks.
As one does at a cafe, they were mousing the track pad with one hand as they sipped their latte with the other.
And that's when it hit me:
"What happens to your lap when you stand up?"
Or more specifically in this case, "What good is your lap when you're at a table?"
The iPad is a beautiful thing in so many respects, but ergonomically it's limited to use on your lap. When sitting at a table, such as any of the thousands of Internet cafes where people enjoy their surfing, the iPad must be held with one hand to keep it at a readable angle, requiring you to choose whether to sip or surf with the other since you don't have a third hand to do both.
I suppose you could prop it up with your backpack, provided you also brought a book to rest the iPad's bottom against to keep it from slipping forward to knock your coffee cup off the table, or you could shell out a few extra bucks for the nifty stand Apple will make available.
But whether or not you cart your stand around with your iPad, you still have to bring the iPad itself. How do you do that?
It's too large for your pocket. That is, unless you can get the new iPants PC World proposed:
Until the iPants show up at your local Gap, if you want to enjoy your iPad anywhere outside of your house you're looking at a backpack or shoulder bag. If you were looking for a pocket-ready device for the iPhone OS you love, your iPhone remains the solution. With the iPad, you're back to where you were with your netbook: roughly the same size and weight, you'll be putting it in your backpack.
But you'll be putting it in that backpack very, very carefully. With no claimshell, the screen is always exposed to whatever else may be in your pack. Even with a slipcover, you'll need something hardshell to protect your investment from the rough edges of whatever else is in your pack.
Okay, so we've worked out a strategy for safely getting our iPad to the cafe, and we've accepted that while we're using it we're going to take a brief pause now and then from the touchscreen to sip our coffee. Fine. But what do we do when we want to type a URL, or reply to an email?
Propped up as we have it for a good reading experience, the iPad's virtual keyboard is now at an angle somewhere between uncomfortable and impossible for typing. So we move our coffee cup out of the way, nudge our pastry to one side, put the book we'd been using as a brace for the iPad back in our pack, and rest our lovely new device flat on the table so we can type.
I'm not sure exactly what happened to restaurant designers over the last ten years, but the prevalence of halogen spot lighting, however economical it may be, plays havoc with our eyeballs from glare. They're great for illuminating art at galleries, but uniquely crappy for ambient lighting where they're so often misued. So when you rest the iPad flat on the table to begin typing, if you've been as unlucky as I have to find yourself in too many cafes using halogen lights, you'll want to bring that book back out of your pack to prop up the top of the iPad at an angle that moves the blinding reflection away from burning a hole in your retina. Sure, that's not an iPad failiure, that's a restaurant design failure, almost as bad as the nearly complete absence in the 21st century of any restaurant whose walls are not lined with noisy televisions. What's up with that? When did they decide we need to stop talking to the person we invited to sit across the table from us and just watch TV instead? But I digress.
Since the case is slightly curved on the back, you'll probably want to prop it up on something anyway, since, as Gizmodo notes, when you lay it flat on the table it has a bit of a rocky rolly feel, making typing that much more difficult.
"So what's your point?" Hold on, almost there. Let's first go back to the living room:
You're sitting on the sofa, with your legs crossed as Steve himself so casually demonstrated on Wednesday:
Looks comfy. Really comfy. You can even change which leg is crossed and still be comfy. Nice.
But what happens if you have an ottoman, if you're as lazy a sitter as I am and you like to have your legs extended? Against what do you prop up the iPad when you're leg isn't up anymore?
I guess you'll be holding it.
There's another, though less significant, point as well. Here's an ergonomics diagram of sitting:
Sure, as an example of office ergonomics it's almost entirely irrelevant to a discussion of what we do in our livingroom, except for one detail: note the angle of the neck for viewing the screen.
A laptop elevates the screen above our lap somewhat to come at least a little closer to that most comfortable angle, even with your legs extended. But the iPad is all screen, and rests directly on your lap a few degrees lower. Two movies later and the effect on your neck angle adds up. Yes, it's close to ideal, but not quite as close as your laptop.
Before I wrap this up I should note how much I respect and admire Jonathan Ive, Apple's lead industrial designer. He's an absolute genious, and rightfully one of the most influential figures in the industy.
Which is why (yes, here we finally get to the point) I have to wonder why the iPad is designed to be used comfortably in exactly one position, the one Steve showed us in the demo, sitting in a chair with the device propped up against one crossed leg.
At a table you need to prop it up, with your legs extended you need to hold it, and when you want to type you need to move it to a more level position less optimal for viewing but the only practical way to work with the keyboard.
Sure, you can get the desktop support for it, along with the add-on physical keyboard. But once you put all that together, it looks like this:
...which looks a lot like this:
But there's one thing your laptop has that the iPad doesn't: OS X. A rich, multitasking OS, on which you can load any apps you like from any source.
Yet for all that, there is a certain appeal to the iPad. It's certainly beautiful to look at, and reportedly feels good in your hand (which is important since you'll have to hold it much of the time).
So I think it won't be quite like the Newton, an interesting idea eventually abandoned. Apple has too much at stake with this, and it seems Jobs himself is uncommonly invested in the iPad.
As an attempt to define an entirely new space for computing, it's a really weird product, in the good sense of the word. But with a form factor that makes it combersome to use outside the livingroom, and even there it's not without some compromises, it's arguably "too tall to live".
So what will become of the iPad?
I'll step out on a limb with a prediction in my next post.
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Richard Gaskin
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