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Rarely does a company have the opportunity to remake an industry and create the Next Big Thing.
Sometimes, as in the case of the Apple Newton, the technology isn’t quite mature enough to deliver on its potential until the marketing damage caused by a poor first impression is irreparable to the brand.
Other times arrogance, avarice, and a failure of vision conspire to cripple a new device, before it even reaches the hands of its potential End Users. Such is the case of Apple’s much vaunted iPad which is only a worthy successor for the Screen of the Newton.
With a decade to improve on that truly innovative creation, we expected no less than a new OS with multi-touch support, as well as a stylus to drive state-of-the-art handwriting recognition, a forward facing cam for video-conferencing, preemptive multitasking, a zoomable interface, a full compliment of standard USB, ethernet, firewire, and solid state memory card ports, a core of deeply integrated notetaking, sketching, and communications modules with an open architecture allowing them to be extended in unforeseen directions, a fresh platform-wide programming language to simplify such development, User Swappable power packs, and an option for wireless video out to an optional transceiver that could be plugged into industry standard projectors.
We expected the freedom to purchase or develop additional software, without paying to join an Apple Developer Program or having to purchase only Apple Sanctioned content through an Apple Store that will probably add to our costs. We would have gladly paid a premium above even laptop prices for the kind of game changer Apple could have offered.
What we were offered was little more than an oversized iPod Touch optimized to act as a mobile cash register to fill Apple’s till.
The old Apple Computer understood that its End Users wanted power and freedom and were willing to pay a premium to have it. Perhaps even more importantly, it believed that we were intelligent individuals and not stupid drones needing to be coddled and told what to think.
Yet again, Apple has betrayed its core values.
At the IEUC, we still believe in End Users and Open Innovation and look forward to seeing what the rest of the industry will develop to leapfrog this latest affront to common sense.