One year ago yesterday, April 3, 2010, the original iPad went on sale. It was a difficult device to define. Was it just a big iPhone? Was it a tablet computer? A netbook competitor? One of the TV commercials that Apple aired in connection with the original iPad was called “What is iPad” and it sought to answer the question of what one might do with an iPad. Here is that commercial, which was narrated by Peter Coyote, a prolific actor with an amazing voice who has been in tons of movies (including E.T.) and television shows (most recently the new Law & Order: Los Angeles):
Now that the iPad has been out for a year, we have a better understanding of what the iPad is. It is a new type of device, a tabula rasa than can do a countless number of different things. In light of the blockbuster iPad sales, other companies are trying to compete by coming out with tablets with different specs. One has a better camera, one has more memory, one has a different size screen, etc. But Apple realizes that the most important aspect of the iPad is to get the hardware out of the way, to be that blank slate on which you can do almost anything. And since Apple has a knack for producing impressive commercials, over this past weekend Apple unveiled a commercial for the iPad 2, again narrated by Peter Coyote, that explains what the iPad is really about:
The videography in the commercial is really beautiful and makes the iPad 2 seem very personal and intimate. When I saw the person playing the virtual guitar in GarageBand, I almost swore that I was watching strings on a real guitar being plucked. But the words are really the star of the commercial. The script is:
This is what we believe.
Technology alone is not enough.
Faster, thinner, lighter … those are all good things.
But when technology gets out of the way, everything becomes more delightful.
Even magical.
That’s when you leap forward.
That’s when end up with something like this.
iPad 2
I don’t think that this is just commercial hype; I think that this ia how the engineers at Apple really think of the iPad, and this is what makes the iPad such a very special device. This is especially true for the iPad 2. It is noticeably faster than my original iPad, but I notice it not in that particular tasks occur more quickly, but instead in that the entire iPad seems so much responsive to my touch. The technology gets out of the way, and I feel even more like I am directly interacting with the app.