Devlab

The always readable Cory Doctorow has written an article on Boing Boing titled Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either).   Go there and read it if you haven’t, and feel free to come back.  He’s got some great points but I disagree.  I think I should buy one!

Ok, you’ve read it?  Great!

I want to address some of his thoughts on the iPad’s hardware and software openness.  The section headed as Infantalizing hardware is where I really diverge with his article.

Indeed, hackers are hackers and they like to play with their hardware and extend it.  But they are (really obviously) not the only consumer out there that matter (and they are still consumers, despite the disparaging of the label).  Sometimes hackers aren’t even part of the equation.  I look down at my iPod Touch now and I totally understand the market Apple is aiming for, and it’s not scatterbrained moms.  I personally don’t want to hack this damn thing, I just want it to display my information when I turn it on.  I am the market (…sometimes).

Technology manufacturers can’t think about hackers and geeks all the time.  Sometimes they have to serve the demographic that doesn’t care and just wants to get on with using their device.  Perhaps not to what we consider it’s “full potential”, but use it they will.

There’s certainly a time and place for hacking in the traditional sense.  But that time is not all the time for some of us, and not all people even care.  To some it’s a nuisance.

That doesn’t make us sheeple.  We just have other things to do.  I want to trick out a device like the iPad about as much as I want to pimp my dish washer.

Cory also writes;

The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

Cory, you must give kids more credit.  This is the model most people use to extend their hardware as is. Kids having access to the iPad, or being exposed to it won’t harm their ideas about openness or extensibility.  They know when something is closed and in that sense sorta limited.  The ones that care will move on to more open things.

The ones that don’t care as they grow up can still use the iPad, or a similar device.  Some people are comfy with constraints and we shouldn’t denounce them as lesser out of ideology.

A good user experience in most cases isn’t about clever puzzles you need to unravel to get your nugget (unless that’s the game, of course).

The idea that you don’t have to figure out how to improve your iPad is one of the goals in Apple’s user experience design.   You just can.  Again, perhaps not to what we consider “full potential”, but that’s not the iPad’s goal.

Growing up, my geek universe consisted of several different technologies.  Some closed, some very open, and even then I knew the different roles they played in my life.

I had the Nintendo Entertainment System (not to mention other consoles, the Atari 2600, etc) which was by any definition a totally closed and hermetically sealed device.  I’m sure there are ways now to “hack” a NES and extend it, but at the time it was far beyond my capacity or that of anyone I knew.  It was a sealed device that took specific cartridges that were handed down on high to us by Toys R’ Us.

I also had a Commodore 64 with it’s massive BBS scene and endlessly copied  5.25″ floppies.  Even at ten years old, that’s where the “work” got done.

My ownership of a closed device like the NES didn’t detract from my enjoyment and diabolical hacking on the Commodore 64, and overall I didn’t get the impression that the NES was the way the world of technology was.

Pictured: What a 4-year-old's Desktop may look like.

Watching my children and the constant whirlwind of older kids in the neighbourhood interact with current technology I see the same relationship happening.  I don’t see the iPad as a harbinger of a new dark age of data lock-in.  They’re going to behave towards these technologies a lot like we did, and already as I watch them interact I think they have greater potential for revolutionary invention than we ever had.

Cory’s article also seems mostly to ignore the iPad’s biggest most open playground of them all.

The web.

Via my iPod Touch, I know that some of it’s best uses happen when I’m connecting it to the web.  If I want to hack at the iPod Touch, I’ll be doing it via web sites.  If the day comes that parts of the web become closed off, I’ll vote with my dollars and my business will go elsewhere.  If you never shopped at the App store you could still get a belly-full of usage out of an iPad.

Cory finishes with the following statements;

If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn’t for you.

If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn’t for you.

If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you’re going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn’t for you.

But can’t we exist in a world with both?  Using an iPad doesn’t cut you off from a more open technical universe.  To re-enter that open universe you just have to put it down and pick up your laptop.  I have devices that facilitate all of those desires for openness in amazing ways.   But when I do slap down my cash for an iPad, I’ll do so knowing that it isn’t quite one of them.  Then again my objective in using an iPad isn’t to hack and extend it’s capabilities.

I just want to be able to check my e-mail and RSS feeds with a really, really good UX.