World Crisis Online

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. (See a roundup of iPad reviews at Techland.com.)

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. (See pictures of Steve Jobs’ extraordinary career.)

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. (See the best netbooks and netbook accessories.)

Introducing the Home Computer

But to say the iPad is revolutionary isn’t quite right. There’s nothing like it out there, so there’s no regime to change. One of the things that makes Apple unique is that it never holds focus groups. It doesn’t ask people what they want; it tells them what they’re going to want next. Where Microsoft likes to enter established markets and take them over by brute force, Apple works by creating new niches and dominating them from the get-go. (See a roundup of iPad content prices at Techland.com.)

Nobody — not even Jobs, by his own admission — is sure what consumers will use the iPad for, but I’m guessing it will be the first true home computer. Conventional PCs live in studies; laptops make brief, furtive forays into the living room. The iPad will become the first whole-house computer, shared among an entire family, passed from hand to hand, roaming freely from living room to kitchen to bedroom to — look, it’s going to happen — bathroom, at ease everywhere, tethered to nothing. It’s not a revolution, but it’s a real change, the kind of change you notice. (See the best social-networking applications.)

If I have a beef with the iPad, it’s that while it’s a lovely device for consuming content, it doesn’t do much to facilitate its creation. The computer is the greatest all-purpose creativity tool since the pen. It put a music studio, a movie studio, a darkroom and a publishing house on everybody’s desk. The iPad shifts the emphasis from creating content to merely absorbing and manipulating it. It mutes you, turns you back into a passive consumer of other people’s masterpieces. In that sense, it’s a step backward. Not much of a fairy-tale ending. Except for the people who are selling content.