Bending Over Backwards

Thursday, 10 March 2011

Walt Mossberg has a 500-word section on “Drawbacks” in his review today of the iPad 2. The whole thing is a crock, an example of trying to be fair/balanced/objective by bending over backwards to find negative things to say about the device. No one is arguing that the iPad 2 is beyond criticism. But almost nothing in Mossberg’s list of drawbacks is valid.

Its cameras take mediocre still photos and Apple won’t even reveal their megapixel ratings. The company says they were designed for video, not still photography. They did capture decent video in my tests, including high-definition video from the rear camera and video good enough from the front camera for satisfying video calling. But, for a company known for quality, which bundles a new still-photo app with the device, the cameras are disappointing.

It’s true that the image quality is mediocre, at best, and it’s fair and makes sense to lead with that as the first drawback. But regarding the lack of megapixel specs from Apple — Mossberg has an iPad 2. All he needs to do is snap a picture, transfer it to his Mac, look at the size, then multiply the width by height. These are not secrets.

Also, the battery life, while very good, isn’t as strong as I found it to be on the first iPad. In my tough battery test, where I played full-length movies until the battery died, with the screen brightness at about 75% and both Wi-Fi and cellular radios running, the iPad 2 just barely exceeded Apple’s claimed battery life, dying after 10 hours and nine minutes. That’s 2.5 hours better than the Xoom did on the same test, but more than an hour less than I got from the original iPad, which clocked in at 11 hours, 28 minutes.

So Mossberg’s second “downside” is that battery life for movie playback — with the brightness set 25 percent higher than Apple’s factory default — exceeds Apple’s stated 10 hours by nine minutes. Apple says you can play video for 10 hours, Mossberg gets 10 hours and nine minutes, and it’s a downside?

You can argue that it should be a “downside” because he got over 11 hours on the same test with an original iPad, but none of the other reviewers seem to be seeing a 10 percent drop in battery life for video playback between the original and new iPads. I saw nearly identical results between the two. Josh Topolsky at Engadget saw better battery life from the iPad 2 than the original.

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a review where a product that exceeds the manufacturer’s stated specs for battery life gets dinged for battery life.

The new Apple iPad 2 shown during its launch event in San Francisco. Another drawback I encountered was that the new, more tapered design makes it harder to plug cables and accessories — including the charging cable — into the main port on the bottom of the device, because it is now angled.

I thought it was a little hard to plug in a cable the first time. Not because of the angle, though, but because the iPad 2’s 30-pin port seemed a bit too tight. Subsequent plug-ins were much easier, though. In the grand competitive landscape of today’s tablet market, this a major drawback of the iPad 2?

Despite being slimmer and lighter, the iPad 2 still has roughly the same length and width as the original, so it can’t compete with the Amazon Kindle, or the smaller seven-inch tablets, if you’re trying to juggle it while standing in a crowded subway.

OK.

Now we get to the good stuff:

Finally, there are two big omissions, one old and one new. The old one is that, like Apple’s prior phones and tablets, the shiny new iPad 2 still won’t play Adobe’s Flash video in its built-in Web browser. This is a deliberate decision by Apple, and puts its devices at a disadvantage for some users when compared with Android tablets, which can play Flash, or say they will soon, albeit not always well.

So the Xoom doesn’t play Flash but promises to eventually, the Galaxy Tab does but often not well, and the iPad 2’s lack of Flash is a disadvantage? No mention that there are clearly trade-offs in play. Like that Flash Player might have some sort of effect on battery life. Or that the lack of Flash on the iPad is an impetus that motivates developers to write native iPad apps.

The other omission has to do with cellular data. The iPad 2 can’t use, or be upgraded to use, the new, faster 4G cellular-data networks being rolled out.

Apple says this is because the chips needed to do this are too immature, draining battery life. But the Xoom promises to be upgradeable to 4G later this year, though I have no idea how that upgrade might affect its battery life or monthly fees.

There is no evidence that Apple’s explanation is wrong, and plenty of circumstantial evidence that they’re right (like, say, the fact that the Xoom, which Motorola promised to ship with 4G, was shipped without it), but accordingly to Mossberg, the lack of 4G is a drawback.

The iPad 2 is a real thing that you can go buy in a store tomorrow. What is Mossberg comparing the iPad to? An imaginary tablet, available today, that does have Flash Player and 4G networking, on which neither technology has an adverse effect on battery life? Why not list the lack of a quad-core processor, instead of the iPad 2’s actual dual-cure one, as a drawback, too?

Mossberg’s entire review is only 1,500 words; measured by the word, a full third of what he has to say about it are these “drawbacks”. By contrast, his 1,200-word review of the Motorola Xoom — a tablet nearly everyone, including Mossberg, agrees is inferior to the iPad 2 — contains one 62-word paragraph of “downsides”.

Stating the plain truth, that the iPad 2 has no serious competition as a mainstream consumer device, doesn’t make you biased. It makes you accurate. ★

The iPad 2

Wednesday, 9 March 2011

I’ve been coming up empty trying to think of a hook for this review of the iPad 2 — an angle, a narrative structure, a theme to put it in perspective and make it more than a list of benchmarks and disparate observations. Then I realized I already wrote it, a year ago, in this back-page column for Macworld:

This is how the designers and engineers at Apple roll: They roll.

They take something small, simple, and painstakingly well considered. They ruthlessly cut features to derive the absolute minimum core product they can start with. They polish those features to a shiny intensity. At an anticipated media event, Apple reveals this core product as its Next Big Thing, and explains — no, wait, it simply shows — how painstakingly thoughtful and well designed this core product is. The company releases the product for sale.

Then everyone goes back to Cupertino and rolls. As in, they start with a few tightly packed snowballs and then roll them in more snow to pick up mass until they’ve got a snowman. That’s how Apple builds its platforms. It’s a slow and steady process of continuous iterative improvement — so slow, in fact, that the process is easy to overlook if you’re observing it in real time. Only in hindsight is it obvious just how remarkable Apple’s platform development process is.

Put another way: Every once in a while, Apple releases something brand-new. The original iPod. The 2007 iPhone. Last year’s iPad. These original releases tend to be minimal technically, but radical conceptually. Then, generally on an annual schedule, Apple improves them iteratively and steadily over time.

This is exactly what they’ve done with the iPad 2. It is a refinement of the original iPad — an impressive one, in several ways, considering that it arrives just 11 months after the original. But it is in no way a radical or significant departure from last year’s model. The fact is, Apple got it right with the iPad 1 in almost every way, and the iPad 2 reflects that. If you didn’t like the original iPad, you’re not going to like the iPad 2. If you liked the original iPad, you’re going to like the iPad 2 even better.

But how much better? The big question, particularly for the Daring Fireball demographic: If you already own an iPad, should you get an iPad 2? My best answer: If you buy a new iPhone or iPod Touch every year, then, yes, you should replace your old iPad with the iPad 2. It’s thinner, a comparative joy to hold in hand, noticeably faster, gets the exact same battery life, and has more RAM (spoiler: 512 MB). If you don’t buy a new iPhone every year — if you have the good sense to hold onto them for more than a year before upgrading to a new model — then you’ll likely want to wait for a new iPad, too.

Most of the 15 million original iPads sold to date do not need to be replaced by iPad 2s. That’s not a problem for Apple, nor a failure for the iPad 2. A $500-800 device should have a useful life that is longer than a year. The same is true for all Apple’s products: iPods, iPads, iPhones, and, of course, Macs. Anyone who argues that the iPad 2 falls short because it doesn’t offer enough to get current iPad owners to upgrade is missing the point. Apple’s target is not the 15-20 or so million people who’ve already bought a tablet. They’re looking at the hundreds of millions of people who haven’t yet, but will soon. The year-over-year delta between Apple products is almost always noticeable but seldom dramatic.

Outside

Physically, the iPad 2 does feel a bit lighter than the old iPad, but it’s the thinness that’s striking. Compared to the new iPad 2, my original iPad doesn’t feel heavy, but it does feel fat. Almost swollen. The rounded edges on the iPad 2 make it significantly more comfortable to hold in one hand.

When you’re looking at the face of the iPad 2, there’s only a hairline of aluminum visible around the black or white bezel, and none of the buttons along the sides — wake/sleep, mute toggle, volume — are visible. The bezel itself is a tad narrower, on the left and right (holding it in portrait mode). The effect of these changes is to further emphasize the screen itself — as though you’re holding not a tablet with a touchscreen, but rather merely holding a touchscreen itself.

My review unit from Apple is a 64 GB black model with 3G. Thus, my time with the white models was limited to the hands-on area after the introduction event last week. The white bezel looks good, aesthetically — very similar to the infamous white iPhone 4s that I played with after last year’s WWDC keynote. But, I found the white bezel distracting. With the black, the frame disappears from mind when you’re using the iPad. With the white, it always seemed like I was looking at a white frame around the screen. There’s a reason why movies are letterboxed with black bars, not white ones, and why most TVs are framed by black.

The display itself, to my eyes, seemed unchanged from the original iPad. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that it is the identical component. As I mentioned before, the surrounding bezel is slightly smaller on the iPad 2, and there is less aluminum around the edge, so the overall device is about 0.2 inches narrower and a hair shorter. But the display itself is exactly the same size, and my eyes detect nothing different about it. It is not laminated to the glass like the iPhone 4 Retina Display.

In short: the iPad 2 is a little lighter, remarkably thinner, and feels much more comfortable to hold. For all practical concerns, the display is identical to last year’s iPad.

Inside

Apple says the iPad 2 is up to twice as fast, CPU-wise, and offers “up to nine times the graphics performance”. The big CPU news is that the iPad 2’s A5 system-on-a-chip contains a dual-core processor; all previous iOS devices used single core CPUs.

I ran benchmarks, but I don’t know how telling the results are. One good benchmark is SunSpider, a JavaScript benchmark from the WebKit team. For one thing, SunSpider shows just how much faster JavaScript is in iOS 4.3 than 4.2, thanks to the inclusion of the newer Nitro engine.

SunSpider 0.9.1 Benchmark (Smaller Is Better)

Device (OS)	Time
iPad 1 (4.2)	8103 ms
iPad 1 (4.3)	3340 ms
iPad 2 (4.3)	2161 ms

For comparison, the Motorola Xoom seems to achieve ever-so-slightly faster results on the same benchmark: about 2050-2100 ms. As you can see from the above numbers for the iPad 1, though, SunSpider is obviously very sensitive to the underlying JavaScript engine — it’s not simply a test of CPU performance.

One more benchmark: Geekbench, which is available both for iOS devices and the Mac.

Geekbench (Higher Is Better)

Device	Overall	Integer	Floating Pt.	Memory	Stream
iPhone 4	356	292	361	499	280
iPad 1	453	364	457	676	308
iPad 2	721	648	879	778	311
MacBook Pro	3399	2825	5079	2353	1621

My MacBook Pro is relatively ancient — it’s a March 2008 model with 2.5 GHz Core 2 Duo. I include it here as a reference point. In short, the iPad 2 being “up to twice as fast” seems about right.

One thing that struck me about these benchmarks, though, is that the iPad 1 consistently outscored the iPhone 4. But in real life, my iPhone 4 feels faster than my iPad. Most people I know who own both agree. For one thing, it’s because the iPhone 4 has better graphics capabilities than the original iPad. That doesn’t show up in benchmarks like SunSpider or Geekbench. With these iOS devices, how it feels is what matters.

In practice, the iPad 2 feels like the fastest iOS device I’ve ever used — faster in every way than the iPhone 4. It doesn’t make my iPhone 4 feel slow, per se, but it does feel faster. Doing various side-by-side comparisons with an iPad 1, I noticed all sorts of places where the iPad 1 lagged. Apps that were launched slowly. Buttons that were pressed that didn’t take effect immediately. Every little thing on the iPad 2 feels more responsive. The Photos app is one example. With the same photo library on both iPads (consisting of several thousand images), it takes about two or three seconds for the iPad Photos app to be ready for use after a cold launch on my iPad 1. On the iPad 2, it’s ready almost instantly. This repeats itself throughout the system: apps launch faster, sometimes way faster, and every little thing within each app feels faster.

Apple, for whatever reason, never advertises how much RAM they include in iOS devices. It’s easy to glean using Xcode, however. Last year’s iPad had 256 MB of RAM. The iPad 2 has 512. This allows more apps to remain open in memory at the same time, and allows Mobile Safari to keep more web pages loaded in memory. Those waiting for a gigabyte of RAM will need to keep waiting, however.

Looking for a better benchmark, I asked my friend Guy English, an iOS developer who has worked on games like Tap Tap Revenge (as a contractor for Tapulous and Disney), to write a custom test app to measure an iPad’s graphics capabilities from the perspective of a game developer. It’s a simple app that renders hundreds (or even a few thousand) sprites moving around on screen, with gravity, and tracking up to three touch points. The results show that the iPad 2’s graphics improvements far outshine its straightforward CPU improvements — exactly as Apple has advertised.

For example, on my original iPad, with 200 on-screen sprites, the framerate dropped to 45 fps. On the iPad 2, with 400 on-screen sprites, the framerate remained at 65 fps. On the iPad 1, Guy’s demo app dropped below 60 fps with about 100 animated sprites; on the iPad 2, it didn’t drop below 60 fps until there were over 750 animated sprites.

After I showed him the results, Guy told me, “The results show that the iPad 2 is easily about twice as powerful as the original and that this speed gain is a freebie — you don’t need to change your code structure in order to see significant gains. The differences in the amount of time spent rendering indicates that the GPU is really much faster than the original. The original iPad had a comparatively weak fill-rate and it was an issue for the device. The second generation really leaves that behind and it looks like it’ll be able to do some really incredible things graphically. My demo code is workman-like, competent code — meant to measure the relative strengths of the parts of the system. Taking some time to get the most out of that GPU and CPU will pay off with some really remarkable games and graphics apps.”

The thing is, it’s hard to find slow iPad apps — including games. Even edge-pushing games like Id’s Rage HD or Real Racing HD run very well on the original iPad. They do seem to run better on the iPad 2, but they’ve been painstakingly developed to take advantage of — and only of — what the iPad 1 had to offer graphically.

We’re not going to see the iPad 2 truly show its stuff until game developers have time to write games that fully take advantage of it. My guess is that it won’t take long until we see games on the iPad 2 that blow away anything possible on the iPad 1, but I’m not aware of any such games yet.

A year from now we might look back upon the iPad 2 as having been built for gaming.

Smart Covers

The star of the hands-on demo experience after the event last week was the Smart Cover, and that really is the perfect name. You don’t really have to try to line it up when attaching it. Just get the hinge vaguely in the vicinity of the left edge of the iPad and it acts like a robot that knows how to (and wants to) connect itself. It jumps into place, and the near-perfection of its automatic alignment is uncanny. There are no indentations, notches, or visible marks along the side of the iPad 2. It just works.

And note: an iPad 2 wearing a Smart Cover is considerably thinner than a naked original iPad.

In addition to securing itself at the spine via magnets, the Smart Cover also stays closed via a magnetic connection to the front face of the iPad. It’s this magnetic connection that allows the iPad to wake up as soon as you open the Smart Cover (with no “slide to unlock” gesture).

Back in December 2009, a few months ahead of the original iPad announcement, I wrote a piece called “The Tablet”. Therein, I asked:

I have a thousand questions about The Tablet’s design. What size is it? There’s a big difference between, say, 7- and 10-inch displays. How do you type on it? With all your fingers, like a laptop keyboard? Or like an iPhone, with only your thumbs? If you’re supposed to watch video on it, how do you prop it up? Holding it in your hands? Flat on a table seems like the wrong angle entirely; but a fold-out “arm” to prop it up, à la a picture frame, seems clumsy and inelegant. If it’s just a touchscreen tablet, how do you protect the screen while carrying it around?

Most of those questions went unanswered by Apple last year. The Smart Cover answers them now. I bought one of Apple’s covers for the original iPad last year and almost never used it, for the reasons outlined by Steve Jobs during last week’s event: it was hard to get the iPad into and out of it; it made the overall device too thick; it just wasn’t elegant. The Smart Cover for the iPad 2 is a joy to connect and disconnect, maintains an overall thin profile while attached, and works terrifically as a prop for the iPad while watching video or typing at a slight incline.

Smart Covers are so cool that I can imagine iPad 1 owners — who think they’re happy to stick with what they’ve got — changing their minds and deciding to upgrade upon seeing Smart Covers in person.

The New Apps

Apple provided me with access to the new iMovie and GarageBand apps for the iPad. iMovie is a universal binary, so if you already bought it for your iPhone 4, you’ll get the upgrade to the iPad-native version free — but it’s only available on camera-equipped devices, so you can’t use it on the original iPad. GarageBand is only available for the iPad, not the iPhone, but it works on any iPad, not just the iPad 2. GarageBand works fine on my original iPad, but it definitely feels better on the iPad 2. It takes less time to open and close projects, touches are more responsive, etc.

Both apps are fun, GarageBand in particular. iMovie is not for everyone, but it’s a shame to imagine any iPad without a copy of GarageBand installed. I’m no musician, so I can’t speak to using it in any serious sense, but the “smart” instruments are amazingly fun and continually surprising. My seven-year-old son loves it.

As for iMovie, it was clear from the on-stage demo last week that the interface was excellent: a fun, simple, obvious way to edit video clips into a movie. One question I had, though, was how to get footage into the app. The obvious way is to shoot it using the iPad 2’s built-in camera, but, come on, no matter how much you love your iPad, you’re not going to use it as your camcorder. Apple’s Camera Connection Kit works well for this. You can shoot footage on an iPhone, then connect the iPhone to your iPad using the Camera Connection Kit. Import the photos and videos from your iPhone to your iPad, and boom, they’re ready for use within iMovie on your iPad.

This seems like something that ought to work wirelessly, though — and ought not require a $29 dongle purchase. I’d love to see Lion’s AirDrop file sharing feature appear in iOS 5. Sending files of any sort between your iPhone and iPad should be easier, but iMovie is just begging for it.

HDMI Out

Apple’s new $39 “Digital AV Adapter” provides HDMI out for the iPad 2. It defaults to mirroring, and works great, including support for device rotation. In apps that already support video out, such as Keynote and some video playing apps, it’s like having a second display. This latter feature works on the old iPad and on iPhones, too. Display mirroring over HDMI, however, is an iPad 2 specific feature.

Battery Life

As far as I can tell, the iPad 2 gets identical battery life to the iPad 1. I played three movies, back to back to back, on an iPad 1 and iPad 2: Casino Royale (HD), The Fantastic Mr. Fox (SD), and the 1980 theatrical cut of The Empire Strikes Back (SD). Both iPads were set at 50 percent brightness (the factory default setting), and I kept the iPads in airplane mode for these tests. Both iPads dropped the same amount of battery life percentage for each movie: 12, 11, and 15 percent, respectively.¹

These numbers are rather amazing, looking back at the pre-iPad era. I recall many times over the past decade when it seemed as though my MacBook (or, depending on the year, PowerBook) was in a race against time to finish a single DVD before the battery ran out during a long flight. Now, you can watch three full-length movies on an iPad and still have 60 percent battery life remaining on the device. It’s a portable computer you don’t have to worry about.

My assumption last year was that behind the iPad’s display, there wasn’t much inside other than a big battery. I guess not, given how much volume Apple has removed from the iPad 2 while maintaining the same excellent battery life.

Conclusion

Here’s another snippet from that Macworld column I wrote a year ago:

That brings us to the iPad. Initial reaction to it has been polarized, as is so often the case with Apple products. Some say it’s a big iPod Touch. Others say it’s the beginning of a revolution in personal computing. As a pundit, I’m supposed to explain how the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. But I can’t. The iPad really is The Big One: Apple’s reconception of personal computing.

Everyone now seems to agree this is a new product category, and most of Apple’s rivals — from computer makers to phone makers — want in on it.

The iPad 2 is a solid second-generation iteration. Easier and more comfortable to hold, noticeably faster, equippable with foldable covers that are both literally and figuratively magnetic. Like last year’s iPhone 4, it seems like technology from the near future. ★

The Chair

Thursday, 3 March 2011

Even the chair on the stage was the same.

Yesterday’s iPad 2 introduction felt like a repeat of last year’s event for the original iPad. Same place. Same pace and structure for the presentation: a brief prelude of statistics showing how well Apple is doing company-wide; a positioning statement for where the iPad fits, why it exists; the reveal of the product; the specs; a tour of the system software; and, then, some demos of a few impressive iPad applications from Apple that are available for just $4.99 in the App Store.

Delightfully, the host was the same as last year, too.

(Have you ever noticed that Steve Jobs is not introduced at Apple’s events? Music plays while the audience fills the room. (Well-chosen popular rock, some new, some old, often Dylan. Now, it’s all Beatles, all the time. It’s as though Apple now treats the Beatles catalog as the company’s official soundtrack.) Eventually, a few minutes before the start of the show, there’s an announcement asking everyone to silence their phones. Then, one or two more songs, and then there simply is no next song. A few seconds later, Jobs strides out, unheralded.)

One difference between this year and last is that Jobs’s presence was not expected. The ovation that greeted him yesterday was loud, almost raucous. We were, simply, happy to see him.

The biggest difference, though, was this: last year Apple didn’t yet understand the iPad. They knew it was good. They knew it had potential. But they didn’t know what it was. They had a sense that in the conceptual space between an iPhone and a MacBook there was uncharted, fertile territory. And they set for themselves a wise metric: the iPad would only succeed if it could do some of the same things a Mac can do, but do them better. If it wasn’t better in several important ways for several common tasks, it would not succeed.

What they didn’t know last year was how people would use it, for real. They know now.

Last year’s flagship app demos were the iWork suite: Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. The message was: the iPad is like a PC, just different — word processors and spreadsheets have been the standard answer to “Why would you buy this computer?” going all the way back to VisiCalc in the early ’80s.

This year, Jobs stated explicitly and repeatedly that the iPad is not a PC. Jobs’s repeated categorization for the iPad: post-PC device. And the demos this year were of a slightly different tone. iWork is, well, work. Making movies and music, though? That’s play.

iMovie for iPad seems like the realization of Randy Ubillos’s vision for movie editing software. Seldom does an app as popular and useful as iMovie get a genuine “let’s just start over from scratch” redesign like iMovie did on the Mac several years ago. And the current Mac version is, without question, a major improvement over the initial redesigned version. This iPad version, though, feels like the real deal, and makes the Mac version seem like the imitator. The concept, visual layout, and intended workflow are naturally suited to touch. This is what the new iMovie is supposed to be.

And GarageBand for iPad — impressive doesn’t even begin to describe it. There are a bunch of musical instrument apps for the iPhone and iPad, and they’ve been used to great effect by many musicians. (Insert your own smirking mockery of those who insist the iPad is only for consumption and not creation here.) GarageBand for iPad is of a different scope. This is Apple taking the idea of the iPad as a musical instrument and tackling that idea with the full strength of its collective creativity. It is the most iPad-ish iPad app I’ve ever seen. Good iPad apps can make the iPad feel not like a device running an app, but like an object that is the app. GarageBand isn’t a musical app running on an iPad. It turns an iPad into a musical instrument. The interfaces for each GarageBand instrument are exquisitely skeuomorphic. Every control — every button, every switch, every slider — is custom designed. The keyboard’s use of the accelerometer to detect how hard you hit the keys seems impossibly accurate for a device that doesn’t have a pressure-sensitive display. If anything, in practice, it worked better than the on-stage demo implied. GarageBand isn’t the iPad doing something better than the Mac. This is the iPad doing something new, things that couldn’t be done on the Mac.

Jobs seemed particularly ebullient throughout, but never more so than when discussing the iPad’s competition. There’s a palpable sense among everyone from Apple I spoke to yesterday that this is the biggest and most important thing in the history of the industry. The this isn’t just the iPad. It’s the whole iOS ecosystem — iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, the App Store, the 200 million iTunes Store account holders, the Apple retail store empire where customers get to touch these things that must be touched to be understood. But the iPad best exemplifies the advantages Apple draws from these things.

Last year, Apple’s take on the iPad seemed to be that they believed they had something good. This year, they seem to know they have something enormous. Presumably, there’s an A5-based dual core iPhone 5 coming in June and a corresponding new iPod Touch and who knows what else coming in September, but Apple is already, a mere two months into it, calling 2011 “The Year of the iPad 2”. Apple sells every new product hard, but they’re not prone to that sort of hyperbole.

In his conclusion, Jobs said, “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology is not enough.” That’s what separates Apple from everyone else, and the iPad epitomizes it. It’s better designed, has more developer support, and it’s cheaper. There are aspects of this that Apple’s competitors seemingly can’t copy — lower prices from economies of scale, amazing battery life, UI responsiveness, build quality.

But there are other things any competitor could copy, easily, but they seemingly don’t even understand that they should, because such things aren’t technical. Take that chair. The on-stage demos of the iPad aren’t conducted at a table or a lectern. They’re conducted sitting in an armchair. That conveys something about the feel of the iPad before its screen is even turned on. Comfortable, emotional, simple, elegant. How it feels is the entirety of the iPad’s appeal.

It’s a shame, almost, that we squandered the term “personal computer” 30 years ago. ★