iPad Predictions

With six days to the iPad, I thought I’d test my punditry with a few predictions.

My Predictions

Year 1

The iPad will be a wild success. The effect will be viral. As they slowly pop up in meetings and classrooms, people will ask, “Can I try it?” They’ll be converted on the spot.

Year 2

We will see iPad clones running Zune OS and Android. By the time they catch up with iPad 1.0, Apple will release a desktop touch OS.

Year 3

Flash will be as rare as “IE Only” sites. If your site has video, it supports the HTML5 Video tag but fall back to Flash for IE. There will be at least one artist authoring tool for HTML5 to fill the void of Flash.

Year 4

WebKit will surpass Internet Explorer.

Let’s Put Things in Perspective

While formulating these predictions, I came across an innocuous status update by a skeptic. I think the debate articulates my reasoning pretty well.

“Who’s going to buy the iPad?”

They are sold out for launch day.

iPad is where computers will head in the next ten years. Maybe five.

“It’s ridiculous. You can get the same thing in an iPod Touch for less. You can get a notebook for the same price.”

The iPad is ridiculously faster than an iPod Touch or iPhone. It’s 600mhz ARM vs a 1ghz A4, and that doesn’t even account for GPU or any other factors that, according to the people who have used one in person, make the iPhone seem downright slow by comparison.

Put aside the hardware. The iPad is not a big iPhone.

The iPad uses iPhone conventions because the iPhone is a touch optimized OS. Use the iPad emulator in the SDK for a while, and you see that an iPhone is actually a crippled iPad.

As for laptops, this isn’t supposed to be a laptop. This is a device you can pick up off a coffee table and use without thinking. The barrier to entry should be your grandmother, who has never heard of a file system. Mind you, it’s capable of much more than that, but that’s the minimum barrier to entry.

“But you don’t need an iPad. You can do the same things with an iPhone or a netbook. You can’t even view Flash.”

Flash is a non starter. Many Flash apps are not designed for touch, and rely on mouse movement. It’s like how your XBox can’t play Wii games. Even if you ported over a game, what’s the point without the input?

As for Flash video, major sites have either ported their video to h.264 MOV’s, or they’re in the process. h.264 files get access to hardware acceleration, cutting down CPU thus enhancing battery life.

Comparing a laptop to an iPad is silly, but let’s look at what a laptop doesn’t have:

• iPhone apps (from day 1)
• iPad only apps
• Multitouch input
• Accelerometer input
• Digital compass
• 10 hours of battery life

Most people will buy it for the bundled software. They want to be able to look at photo albums, read the New York Times in bed, and listen to music. Some people will never open the app store, much like Wii owners who never ejected their “Wii Sports” disc.

But what makes the platform truly unstoppable is the app store. The iPhone gold rush was caused by removing the barrier between developer and buyer. As a developer you get:

• One click impulse buying
• No need for credit card processing infrastructure
• A homogeneous platform, dramatically simplifying tech support
• Dramatically lower rates of piracy

Now that there’s a platform with a display large enough to support desktop class apps, and more power, you will see an explosion of iPad only apps. The Day-1 apps are solid, but the killer apps are yet to be written, and won’t be from Apple.