Rui CarmoBeing one of “those people” who use an iPad in lieu of a conventional laptop for many productive endeavors (like writing this response, which may yet challenge the meaning of “productive”…), I’ve been waiting for Apple to turn some of those bold statements into actual enablers, but it’s been a long, parched, desert crossing of sorts.
Case in point: Many moons ago, way before we actually got it as a “feature”, I wrote a piece on my blog about how to enable Cmd+Tab by way of VoiceOver — which is still one of the most popular pages on my site, for some odd reason.
Apple’s roundabout approach to boosting the iPad’s credibility as a primary computing device, despite justifiable through lack of resources (and, let’s face it, some focus), is probably their biggest handicap. And I daresay it’s all in-house, almost as if it were a blind spot.
That said, I agree with Jean-Louis Gassée that iPads are amazing, somewhat overpowered workhorses with life cycles that have no match to phones or PCs, and that we haven’t quite figured them out as a category yet.
But I also keep wondering if/when Apple will let them mature into their own thing (be it OS, UX, etc.) They’re the perennial teenager in Apple’s product line, and they need to figure out what they need to be when they grow up.