Why the iPad and other tablets aren’t just “shiny”.

Okay, I make a big deal about gadgets I describe as “shiny”. Apple is good at shiny. They’ve made a lot of money recently by understanding that people love to own pretty things. What do I mean by “shiny”, exactly? Most expensive jewelry falls into the category of extreme shininess, though jewelry generally isn’t considered gadgety. It sits around being expensive, looking pretty and not doing much else. It is a status symbol because it just screams “I have enough money to buy this really expensive thing for myself for no real reason. Don’t you wish you were me?” Being objective for a moment, I will admit that this is a bitter and cynical point of view. Psychologically speaking, however, it is also reasonably accurate. Gifts of jewelry as reminders of permanence or mementos of affection are something else altogether and can generally be identified because their meaning is more important than their price tag.

Digital picture frames are a good example of extreme gadget shininess and very low utility. They fall into the category best described by Alton Brown as a unitasker and their task is primarily cosmetic. In fact, there is a kind of negative utility involved in having a digital picture frame, since its only job is to sit around looking pretty and you have to spend at least some of your precious time loading pictures onto the thing and a little of your hard-earned money keeping it fed with electricity.

So what, then, saves a shiny gadget from irrelevancy? The very thing a diamond ring and a digital picture frame lack: utility. If I give you a diamond ring for a week and take it away, have you lost anything other than the resale value of the ring? Do you miss it because you can no longer do something you could do with the ring on your finger? (Ignore this point if you own The One Ring. Invisibility and the ability to bend the will of men and elves is utility!)

This brings us to the iPad and the gadget niche it created for the invading hordes of tablets we can expect to see flood the market now and in the years to come. These devices have a kind of easily portable utility that is, while shiny, also useful in the extreme. Regardless of the manufacturer, each tablet brings a specific kind of utility that is the sum of the applications available for the device. Apple has the current edge here, of course, but other companies are working very hard to close the gap. In my experience, my iPad can and does act as an organizer, a notepad, a communications device (emergency backup telephone capability included, thanks to Skype), a research tool, an entertainment device and a financial tracker. If this is starting to sound familiar, that is because the only other machine that can boast this kind of versatility is a personal computer. Here’s where things get interesting!

What is the deep-down difference between a personal computer and a netbook or a tablet? Absolutely nothing! A tablet is a computer that may (or may not, in the case of Windows-based tablets) run a different operating system and sport a different input method, but it is still just a personal computer. In the case of a tablet, the primary trade-off is extreme portability for extra processing horsepower. So why would anybody trade the power of a personal computer for a tablet? The sad truth is that most people with modern personal computers use a tiny fraction of the power they purchased. Computers have been getting steadily more powerful (Moore’s Law: look it up if you don’t know what it is) to the point that your average web-surfing, email-writing and light-game-playing user sits on several orders of magnitude more unused computing horsepower than it took to send a man to the moon. Apple realized (fuelled, no doubt, by the brief popularity of the “netbook”) that the average user would be more than happy with less power for less money and more portability. If they got excellent battery life and a truly powerful and intuitive control scheme along with it, so much the better. A cheaper application infrastructure focused on what most people do with their computing time drives the trend even further. (I bought the iPad’s word processor, Pages, for $10. Suck on that, Microsoft Office!) The best part is that all the end user really has to give up is the “bloat”. The bloat is the glut of features the average user almost never uses, but buys on the off chance that they might need them. This perception of utility is somewhat along the same lines as putting a blender in your car. Sure, once in awhile, it’s nice to have a road-smoothie, but how much real utility have you gained? Psychology being what it is, though, you start to look a new cars without blenders as kind of a let-down.

This brings us full-circle to the “shiny”. Apple, in their marketing genius, figured out how to give our hungering psyches a pacifier to make up for our lost bloat and it is the one thing that only Apple does extremely well in today’s tech market: they gave us the shiny! At least this is one time that a little bit of technological vanity fuelled a change in the tech market that’s actually good for the consumer.