More than the specifications of the device itself, one question preoccupied the 600 attendees crammed into a curtained-off studio at BBC Television Centre for Apple’s launch of the iPad 2. Would Steve be on stage?
And, after a prompt 6pm start, he was. Still painfully thin – the belt around his trademark blue jeans appeared to have been cut short to prevent it from dangling – but in good voice and spirits, the founder and CEO, currently on sick leave, dominated the cinema-size video feed relayed live from the event in San Francisco. Acknowledging a huge round of applause with a smile, he explained: “We’ve been working on this a while. I didn’t want to miss today.”
He wasn’t the only one. Although the London event was only a simulcast, and despite having booked out one of those hangar-like auditoria in which live TV shows are shot (the War of the Worlds-scale lighting rig having been scrunched away to one end behind three enormous projection screens), Apple had had to break out the plastic chairs to squeeze us all in. What impressed us most was that, arriving half an hour before kick-off, we found the auditorium already full. That’s not how journalists work.
Typically, Jobs began by teasing us with statistics. 15 million iPads sold, making nearly 10 billion dollars in just nine months, possibly the fastest-selling consumer product of all time. He digressed to confirm a widely expected deal with Random House to sell iBooks of the publisher’s titles on the App Store. He paused to suggest that iTunes’ 200 million registered customers probably exceeded Amazon’s, though, since Amazon declined to release figures, that couldn’t be verified.
There was even a video celebrating “2010: the year of the iPad”, showing a diverse and well-scrubbed user base applying their iOS tablets to everything from surgery to porn. (We may be kidding about the porn.) But nobody doubted what we were here for, and before the foot-shuffling grew too restive, Steve let it drop. “We’re going to introduce today… iPad 2.”
Not that there’d been anything wrong with iPad 1, we were reminded. “People laughed at us for saying it was magical,” admitted Steve, provoking more laughter, “but it turned out to be. People weren’t sure that it was an ‘unbelievable price’ – ask our competitors now!” Barely threatened by more expensive and less desirable rivals, the iPad had already outsold every tablet PC ever made.
Knowing all this, many commentators had been predicting a modest tweak. A camera for FaceTime, sure. A little scraped off the size and weight, perhaps at the expense of that crazy all-day battery life. Otherwise, meh. Another iPad, maybe a little cheaper and less over-engineered to head off the clones.
That, of course, was never the Apple way. “Not marginal improvements,” promised our host. “It’s a completely new design.”
And such is the power of Steve that we believed him; and continued to believe him, even as he listed changes that corresponded precisely with the gentle evolution we’d anticipated; and continue to believe him now, sitting on a train an hour and a half later, typing on a magical yet instantly obsolete iPad 1.
Even though it costs exactly the same as before; and it’s built around the same screen (there really isn’t much to an iPad, physically, except the screen); and it doesn’t have any new buttons or sockets, or do away with any of the old ones; and it won’t fit in your pocket any better than the previous model – even so, new iPad is new.
Most dramatically: it’s not only thinner than an iPad 1, it’s thinner than an iPhone 4. When Jonathan Ive says “We reduced three surfaces to two” – meaning that it has a top and a bottom but no edge – he’s not being entirely hyperbolic.
Tapering away like a MacBook Air, the new iPad is illogically flat for something with such a large footprint. Only Apple’s unibody aluminium case could hold it sufficiently rigid. It’s astonishing and unique.
Yet they’ve managed to fit more, not less, inside. The new A5 processor, again designed specially by Apple around an ARM CPU, is said to be twice as fast as its predecessor and incorporate a graphics processor providing nine times the performance of the earlier GPU. Somehow, the battery life remains the same, at ten hours’ continuous use. Manufacturers used to invent figures like that and claim they were possible in the lab. As iPad 1 users can testify, Apple means it.
Then there are the cameras. One facing backwards for taking pictures, and one facing forwards for FaceTime, which, as demonstrated, looks like it was invented for the nearly-life-size 9.7in screen; as indeed it may have been, because we know Apple always intended the iPad to have a camera. It was provided for in the original internal design, but omitted presumably on cost grounds, or to leave a more than marginal improvement for the second generation.
Well, here it is, and it makes the iPad, as Apple’s copywriters might say, even funner. It’s not there because you need it. It’s there because it makes it even more impossibly difficult to fail to imagine what great times you’re going to have with your iPad, once you stop staring at the price tag and swallowing.
Naturally – because this is Apple – the updated hardware comes with updated software. iOS 4.3, of which much is already known, will ship with the iPad 2 and as an update for previous iOS devices on 11 March, and Scott Forstall, senior VP of iOS software, was wheeled on to introduce some of its features to the public.
Which was nice, but what got the audience going were the demos of iMovie and GarageBand. There’s already a mini-iMovie for the iPhone; the iPad version, still only $4.99, does much more, and a single purchase covers both devices. Before we called software “apps”, we used to test products that did less for 20 times that price and call them top value.
Apple’s consumer music production app hadn’t made it onto iOS until now, leaving a vacuum filled by third-party alternatives such as NanoStudio. Having waited this long, they haven’t done GarageBand by halves. Besides full editing facilities, it comes with a completely new set of Touch Instruments that make brilliant use of the iPad as a control surface.
Tap the drums harder and they play louder. On a touchscreen, that’s impossible. But they’ve used the accelerometer to mimic the velocity sensing built into electronic keyboards. Of course, there’s no way to do aftertouch, the synth feature that modulates the sound when you press down on a key after striking it.
Yet they’ve done that too. Slide your fingers backwards and forwards on the piano keys (up and down the screen) and a blue dot follows them, bending pitch or varying parameters such as vibrato. In the guitar app, you can not only stop strings but bend them. And so on. Again, for $4.99. The toolbox may be uncompromisingly pricey, but think what you’re saving on the tools.
To get to here from last week’s glockenspiel-level third-party keyboard apps is genuinely remarkable. You wouldn’t catch Microsoft or Google doing this. In exactly the same way as with the hardware, Apple is really excited about this stuff and really good at it, and it shows. This, more than the slimmest case and the longest battery life, is what makes the iPad magical.
As significant as what Apple builds in is what Apple leaves out. And, having left out, sells you a £25 adaptor to put back. Accessorising was a theme to which Jobs warmed. He spent quite some time extolling the virtues of a $39 gizmo that lets you mirror your iPad’s screen display or output up to 1080p video to an HDMI TV (this also works with other iOS devices). And he positively gushed about the iPad 2′s screen cover – not an afterthought, we we assured, but “designed alongside” the device, presumably in Jony Ive’s lunchbreak – which snaps onto magnets built in for that purpose.
The Smart Cover pops on and off with ease, folds up into a prism that will support your iPad 2 like one of those cases that we’re already getting press releases for in iPad 2 versions, and comes in leather or plastic in several colours at only slightly eye-watering prices. To some of us, it looked like something you’d unroll on a Greek beach and will curse every time you try to slide your kit into a bag and it pops off. But we’ll reserve judgement until we try it.
A number of things were also left out of the launch presentation. Remember the iPhone 4 launch, and the time devoted to explaining how the ultra-high-resolution Retina Display would change everything? Today, no-one spoke of resolution. The iPad 2′s screen remains, as we expected, at an old-school 1024 x 768. It’s good, but once you’ve seen an iPhone 4 – or when you’re trying to read 8pt newspaper type – it’s not insanely great. And the screen, after all, is the part you use.
Disappointingly, we didn’t see anyone lift an iPad to eye level to snap a picture with the backward-facing camera, an action of sufficient awkwardness to have led many to believe this feature would never materialise. Someone is surely going to have to figure out a way to make it look natural in the TV ad. Wish them luck.
While we learned how iOS 4.3 would let us stream HD video wirelessly, there’s no sign of any change to the more mundane process of syncing the iPad with a Mac. Like its forebears, the slender new tablet remains inert until you plug a USB cable – no mention of Thunderbolt here – into its chunky 30-pin Dock, and will swap music, video and photos with your desktop storage only through the same cable, not via wifi. This doesn’t feel like the future. It feels like plugging the RS232 cable into a Psion Organiser in 1986. Except that was optional.
Nor was there any word on how the iPad ecosystem might cope with such a more than marginal enhancement. Of the 350,000 apps released for iOS, only 65,000 have been created or adapted for the iPad. Now here’s a different model again, with graphics performance in a new order of magnitude. Taking full advantage will mean sacrificing backward compatibility or writing extra code or both. You have to sell a lot of 59p apps to pay for another hour’s coding.
Can a fragmented platform preserve the simplicity we know and love and the sales that developers pray for, or must iOS users learn to read system requirements and curse their year-old junk when the next killer app emerges for cutting-edgers only? Time will tell; but there’ll be no cute video about it.
Most conspicuous by its absence was the traditional Jobs keynote “one more thing”. Breaths were bated, but it never came. Instead, Steve made all the people who created the iPad 2 stand up for applause; and then, having thanked them, he thanked their families for supporting them and making it all possible.
The significance was unmistakable – and all the more so because he prefaced this with a little speech, not about how much money Apple was making (which he’d already told us), or how far behind every other technology company had slipped (although he’d mentioned that quite a lot), but about what Apple stood for.
“It’s technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that makes our heart sing,” said Steve. And from our seats way below the big screen, closer than the front row, it was easier than ever to believe that the man, like his company, was simply too big to fail.
- See a first look at the new iPad at the London launch event.
- Find all the details of the iPad 2 on Apple’s website.
- Buy an end-of-line iPad 1 from just £329 at the UK Apple Store
