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Infinite Loop / The Apple Ecosystem

Insanely great? Ars reacts to the Apple iPad

The Ars crew weighs in on the iPad announcement with a mix of quick takes and …

Aurich Lawson, Creative Director

When it comes to the iPad I'm a lot less interested in surfing the Web, checking my e-mail or playing games. What draws me is its potential as a jack-of-all-trades media device. Can it function as an e-reader well enough to stave off E-Ink with its annoying screen refresh? It doesn't need to replace my plasma (or even my laptop), but does it make a good portable video player? Lastly, but maybe most importantly to me, can I read a comic book on it?

The e-reader part is pretty easy. Apple gave the iPad a good IPS LCD, which looks like it should handle just fine for everyone but the most die-hard E-Ink proponent. Maybe it's not a Kindle killer, but it looks like a real player, at the very least. Choosing the ePub format instead of something proprietary is good, and the store should have the typical Apple polish. And 132 pixels per inch isn't stunning, but it will do to render text.

Video is a little more mixed. I don't need a super-high resolution on a portable screen, so 1024x768 is probably more than fine, but in this widescreen era the decision to go with a pure 4:3 screen is somewhat disappointing. The reality is that just about anything I would watch on this screen is going to be letterboxed pretty hard. When you only have a 9.7" screen to begin with, it's hard to give up so much of it to black bars. The video-out options are a little lame, but I'm having trouble thinking of times when I'll want to plug an iPad into my HD TV. Not a huge deal, because it was never meant to be a primary video player, but it could be better.

How about a comic book? This is a real geek killer app.  Without color, E-ink isn't a player here, and laptops are pretty marginal as readers. Laptops have keyboards that get in the way, they aren't easy to rotate for optimal screen orientation, and they're either pretty heavy or not so great in the screen department (dinky 7" screen netbooks need not apply!). Could this be the comic book reader some of us have dreamed of? Sort of. Once again, that 4:3 screen rears its ugly head, and makes me scratch mine. Maybe you couldn't nail a perfect piece-of-paper ratio, but couldn't you have come closer, Apple? Not just for comic books, but for the whole world of digital print, magazines, reports and everything else that would be wonderful to get in a pretty faithful translation. 9.7" is a tiny bit small for the screen, but realistically it's hard to see anything coming to market much larger and still meeting with commercial success, so I can live with it. The remaining question, then, is the software.

On this front there is good news. For old comic book scans (CBR/CBZ) there are already reader apps for the iPhone. It's hard to imagine they won't either be updated for the iPad or that new apps won't step in to fill the void. Apple's closed app ecosystem is sometimes a drag, but in this case it shouldn't be a barrier. It looks like the SDK has better support for file management, so hopefully the hacks that the iPhone uses won't be necessary to import comics.

On the commercial distribution side there is also a lot of hope. While Apple didn't announce any deals with companies like Marvel or DC, there is already a pretty good storefront/reader on the iPhone in the form of Comics by Comixology that is already bringing in the major comic publishers to test the waters. It's surprisingly useful on the small iPhone screen, and the developer is a member of our forums here at Ars (Metasyntactic); he's already announced that he will be doing a full iPad update. If it has even half the love and attention the small screen version does, it's sure to become a killer app for me.

Did Apple hit it out the park? Not really, but I'd call it a solid base hit. It's not likely that some of the iPad's downsides will get fixed any time soon—I can't see Apple changing the screen resolution or aspect ratio in a hardware update—but I think it falls pretty squarely into the realm of "good enough." I'm also not sold on the idea that a combination of Android and small-fish hardware players can beat Apple in industrial design and UI, and I'm not a fan of the HP strategy of cramming a full desktop OS into a slate form factor, so this is probably my comic reader for 2010.

Chris Foresman, Contributing Writer

The iPad will have Apple-developed apps—Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, aka iWork—that can create actual documents. Sure, you can use an iPhone to create media files like photos, videos, and audio recordings; these are then synced to iTunes automatically whenever the iPhone is plugged in your Mac. Several third-party apps—Writeroom, for instance—create documents, but you're limited to storing them inside their own on-device sandbox, and they have to create their own way to get them back to your Mac.

One of the benefits of iWork on the Mac is that content from one app can be easily included in documents for the others. For instance, you could include a chart based on data from a Numbers spreadsheet in a Keynote presentation. When that data is updated in the spreadsheet, the chart can be automatically updated in Keynote. If documents were sequestered away from each other on the iPad, you wouldn't be able to do this. Furthermore, how would you get your iWork files onto the iPad for editing, and how would you get files created on the iPad back to your Mac?

Thankfully, Apple has addressed this in the iPad-only iPhone OS 3.2. The documentation for the SDK indicates that it uses a "shared folder" that any iPad application can read and write. This shared folder will also mount as a disk whenever an iPad is plugged in to a Mac or PC, allowing easy file transfer.

This shared folder solves the problem of transferring files, and allowing one app to read data from other app's files. Nonetheless, Apple could take this capability and extend it further. Apple could leverage iDisk to keep this shared folder in sync between a Mac and an iPad over-the-air, instead of relying solely on a wired, USB connection.

My hope is that Apple is looking to take this even further than simple iDisk syncing, however. The conventional wisdom suggests Apple will leverage its Lala acquisition to build cloud-based storage for your iTunes library. But why stop there? Apple could build a service that lets me store a copy of all my important data—iTunes library, iPhotos, iWork documents, PDFs, etc.—and sync it with the cloud. The biggest convenience of MobileMe is the automatic syncing of contacts and other data between it, the iPhone, and any registered Mac. If Apple could extend that to account for more types of data—a sort of "MobileMe Extreme"—it could really have a hit on its hands.

John Siracusa, Ars Apple Specialist

The iPad is pretty much what I expected. Even my "wildcard" prediction of an optional hardware keyboard came true. The only surprises were pleasant ones: Apple using ePub instead of inventing its own e-book format (though I still don't know what the DRM story is), completely transparent compatibility with existing iPhone applications right out of the gate, and the reasonable price of the low-end model.

Just a few hours after the announcement, I have only two major complaints. The first is the lack of a USB port or SD card slot. It seems like the necessary hardware is in there (the Camera Connection Kit adapters promised by Apple look like passive devices) and there's plenty of room around the edges of this monster for the ports. One of the biggest advantages of a larger form factor has been squandered.

The second disappointment is the relative dearth of big content deals. I'm sure more will be announced as the months and years pass, but I would have liked a stronger showing in this area, something that measures up to the iTunes music store announcement in 2003 that had all the major labels onboard.

I eagerly await the raft of obvious iPad hardware and software upgrades in the coming years: third-party-accessible multitasking in iPhone OS 4.0, a camera or two, support for other wireless carriers, and, of course, ever faster CPU/GPU combinations and more RAM. (But maybe Apple could think about adding a built-in microphone and a camera to the iPod touch first…just saying.)

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