micah t collins

It’s Not a Big iPhone

John Gruber in response to Marco Arment:

I would say that redefining mobile computing is exactly what happened. It is surprisingly, delightfully, iPhone-esque in many ways. But if you use it for just a few minutes, it becomes obvious that the iPad is not a big stretched-out iPhone, but rather that the iPhone is a shrunken stripped-down version of the iPad. The iPad is what they’ve been building toward all along.

This is, perhaps the reason so many people are disappointed. Do you remember that event in 2007? The iPhone OS was so revolutionary that when we saw it on a phone it was mind blowing.

So imagine for a moment that there was no iPhone (gasp!). Then, out of the blue Apple introduces a beautiful touch screen computer that quite literally redefines the mobile interaction model. Truly desktop-class computing with your hands. Now imagine that in January of 2011 they take everything you love about the iPad and put it in your pocket.

Put simply, I’m starting to think that the iPad came out second when it should have come out first. I sincerely hope that it’s fate isn’t sealed by it’s place in time.

I think it’s all good. What Apple does so brilliantly is build scalable platforms, but constrains their scope and complexity at first.

These constraints are chosen, or accepted, in such a way to nurture a sustainable innovation vector and provide opportunity for developer learning and user learning. The iPad following the iPhone adheres to this notion.

We can see this in how many developers were trained up on “mobile Mac OS” by building discrete focused apps whose scopes were limited by the narrow pipes and limited display and limited peripherals to access in the hardware and via the hardwares interfaces both wireless and physical.

We can also see this how users learned how to interact with their personal media and information as well as the Internet via a touch medium that required new gestures and usage modalities. The scope of what was learnable was limited by the lack of confounding UI cases like cut and paste and multitasking.

For penetrating truly mass markets, some feature conservation can go a long way towards avoiding complication introduced by “executing complexity” poorly.

Constraints also bound the hardware resource requirements which help make devices cheaper, prettier, and last longer on battery. Building a tablet 3 years ago was a bit ahead of the microprocessor MIPS/milliamp curve… remember what tablet hardware looked like (see Dell, IBM, HP, Motion Computing, etc).

All these self inflicted constraints are also made possible by being a big enough leap over you competition – in systems development know-how, in talent, and in vision – to stave off the “looking bad in the face of competitors” pressure that also leads to feature creep.

Apple operates at a level that allow them to balance their own tradeoffs on their own terms. I think the iPad is a nice assertion by Apple that they are in this for the long hall and that their new platform is just getting started. With this kind of wind at it’s back the iPad hits the ground running with a big sized sail in it’s back pocket.

Source: jeffrock