Tales From a Relic: How Will the iPad Change Our World?
You know that you’re old when you walk into a store and the person that greets you is half your age. In fact that happens to me every time I go to an Apple store, the closest one to my home is at the Partridge Creek Mall in southeastern Michigan. Is closer to me than London Ontario and you can bet Canadians this weekend will be traveling there to pick up their new iPad from Apple.
It has certainly been a long and winding road from my beginning in computers to the weekend of the iPad. As most of you know I have been a Macintosh zealot since 1986 and my good friend John Gardner has used the technology for years. When you are as old as we are it’s almost like you have a bit of computer DNA stamped on your posterior. I learned computers in the days they were very difficult to use, in fact like pounding stones together so now I look forward to the weekend where I believe everything might change. It has been a long time since MS-DOS.
You can see the temperature change just by the looks of some of the 20 something Apple employees when I enter the store and start talking. When I tell them that I bought my first Mac in 1987, their eyes glaze over like I am some sort of relic. In fact, that fact alone does give me relic status, having believed in Apple at a time when many in the world were passing by. Needless to say, I tell those kids quite a few stories about the old days, IBM and those dreaded computers named after a number. (286,386,486 Pentium etc.)
It is what it is and I don’t want to say much more than that. Apple stock jumped to an all-time high on Monday of $233.86 a share. So they do not need much more help from me. Buy their expensive stock at your peril. Apple is an amazing company that has made amazing computers for many years. What I find interesting looking into the future is how the iPad might change computing forever.
Some of you might be scoffing already. I will give you that. However, I have seen the computer revolution go from the large mainframe computers housed in climate controlled rooms to what we have this weekend, a slim tablet handheld device using motion commands with enough power to dwarf those old mainframes. My main question is will this new technology open up new horizons in computers, which will boost not only personal productivity to change the way we live and interact? For whatever reason I think this weekend might represent a watershed moment.
For those of you who insist on buying virus protection on those Microsoft Windows-based boxes, I don’t think your world is going to change much. There are billion-dollar industries set up in this world to patch over and fix the problems created with those boxes and I don’t expect that to change very quickly. Needless to say I will be very interested to see if the iPad takes over in an even bigger way than the iPod did when it came to the market. Even people with Windows-based boxes must have their limits with mediocrity.
I may be all wet about this I dunno. For instance last week I gave a presentation in Peterborough Ontario to a group of realtors. What I quickly found out when I started these presentations was the digitally savvy makeup of the audience. In fact the venues where I was presenting had seamless wireless networks. That gave me the ability to go live on the Internet, take advantage of online video and capture things in real time in the cyber world to show the audience. So in Peterborough, the realtors got pictures video and sound during the presentation were only a few years ago it would’ve been a black-and-white projection on the wall. I’m thinking the iPad is going to change all that again, the question is will there be even wider applications after it is released?
I think so. For instance I think the iPad will be the “e-reader killer”. The new iBook store will surely rival iTunes in the future. The new iPad platform may change the way we read and view newspapers, especially those big-city rags that are losing so much money. Of course it will make CKtimes.ca look so much better and confirm the visionary status my good friend John Gardner had so many years ago.
Next week at this time, there will surely be some of you reading this on your iPad. Kudos goes to Apple and kudos goes to you. What’s the future? Who the heck knows!