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Steve Jobs didn't invent the tablet computer. In the past 10 years, practically every serious PC company has shipped one. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, a man impervious to the lessons of history, arrived at the Consumer Electronics Show (the Comdex de nos jours) in January waving yet another Windows tablet, this one made by Hewlett-Packard. But nobody has ever gotten the marketplace to pay attention. The tablet computer is like a siren that calls seductively to computer engineers, only to wreck them fatally on the stony coast of our total lack of interest.
But Jobs likes nothing better than frolicking in the graveyard of other companies' dead products. Digital music players had been around for years before Apple made the iPod. When it comes to finally making the tablet computer work, Apple has a few weapons those other companies don't have. It has world-beating displays. It has plenty of expertise in low-power engineering; the iPad's specs say it can do 10 hours of Web surfing on one charge. More important, to make up for the absence of a keyboard, Apple has its much patented multitouch technology. The attempts of other companies to emulate multitouch are either funny or sad, depending on your temperament, but they are always futile.
Most important, Apple's engineers know something those other companies don't: form has trumped function. You can load up a tablet with horsepower and extra features till it can do your taxes and lick the stamp, but if it's not instantly obvious how to use those features without a manual--and if you don't look good using them--nobody cares. The iPad isn't wildly feature-rich. It doesn't run Flash, and the only browser it runs is Safari. Like the iPhone, it can't multitask, and it doesn't appear to have a serious file-handling system. I've tried its much ballyhooed full-size virtual keyboard, and it feels like typing with frostbite. It doesn't even have a damn camera. But you will care about it, because whoever designed its graceful lines and intuitive interface cared about you.
Moreover, the iPad is merely the tangible component of a much larger device, an entire Internet ecosystem that extends out to the horizon in every direction. Other companies simply cannot match Apple's skill in constructing media pipelines for its products. The iPad is launching into the teeth of a storm of competition: there's a tablet shipping this month called (unfortunately) the JooJoo that is physically the iPad's rival, and Sony, Dell, Acer, Asus, Lenovo and (undaunted) Microsoft are all said to have next-gen tablets in the works, to say nothing of the inevitable swarm of Chinese knockoffs. But nobody anywhere does delivery like Apple, and a tablet is only as good as the stuff you can put on it.
Apple already took this hill with the iPhone. The App Store alone has piled up 150,000 offerings in the space of not quite two years, turning the iPhone into a mature mobile-gaming platform to rival Nintendo's DS. The iPad will hold that hill and erect cruelly unassailable fortifications on it. The most interesting steel-cage match this year will be Apple and the iPad vs. Amazon and the Kindle in the e-bookselling arena. I've seen what books look like on the iPad, and I've seen Apple's e-bookstore. The iPad is going to fold, mutilate and spindle the Kindle.
Introducing the Home Computer