There’s nothing we’ve all been waiting for, and the iPad isn’t it

Why not resume my tech commentary blog in the days after a major Apple product announcement?

Collectively, we seem to be in the midst of inventing something. We know that it will be portable and electronic, and that it will do a lot of stuff. Other details remain in a state of flux as emerging device classes appear, multiply, and set about consuming each other like amœbæ. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we’re breeding something: producing a proliferation of gadgets with varying traits, mating the successes to each other and consigning the failures to oblivion. For now, r-selection seems to be the rule.

We began this process with the multifunction desktop computer on one side of a divide, and an array of single-function portable devices—music players, communicators, cameras—on the other. In the 80s and 90s these two worlds took their first tentative steps toward each other, with the laptop computer and the PDA respectively.

Then, suddenly, there was a frenzy. As electronic components grew smaller and cheaper, portable devices merged one-by-one, hinting at a future with a single, pocket-sized device to rival the power of the desktop computer. Meanwhile, laptops grew smaller in an effort to satisfy the demand for ubiquitous computing (but also larger, as if to fill every possible niche in the power–portability continuum).

It becomes tempting to take this mælstrom of invention—seemingly moving toward an inevitable telos—as evidence of technological determinism. As we near the apparent endpoint, we’ve even taken to describing our devices with logocentric language: the iPhone becomes the “Jesus Phone” and the iPad the “Moses Tablet.” (A Google search on the second phrase returns iPad-related sites among the top 10 hits, intermingled with results related to the other well-known tablets that might be associated with Moses.)

At the current moment in the dialectic, we have had two devices facing each other in a state of uneasy tension. The netbook is a fully functioning computer that, despite its advantages in portability over larger machines, is still too bulky to carry with you at all times. The smartphone fits in your pocket but is just too small to provide the full computing experience we desire. The first is awkward in space, agile in cyberspace; the second is ready-to-hand but proves to be a tiny window onto a sprawling world.

So we’ve begun the next round of our breeding experiment. The goal is to create a device with the portability of a smartphone and the versatility of a netbook. It is this space that the iPad tries to negotiate, but fails:

Just yesterday I was looking at my iPhone thinking “Hmmm, I wish this thing didn’t fit in my pocket and couldn’t make phone calls.” Then I looked over to my netbook and couldn’t help but feel it would benefit from losing the keyboard and being made of 50% glass. —Reddit user Frankeh

It is difficult to see how the tension between smartphone and netbook can ever be resolved. Any device larger than an iPhone will require a bag to tote around; any device smaller than an EEE PC will prove inconvenient for web browsing or word processing. There is no “God device,” no sweet spot where portability and power can both be maximized. Technological determinism is shown, once again, to rest on an oversimplification.

Instead of a single device, there will continue to be a range of devices covering the power–portability continuum, each appropriate within a certain context of use. Perhaps your particular needs call for a smartphone and a desktop machine; perhaps a netbook and a larger laptop fit the bill. Individual and social needs will always confound the tyranny of the one-gadget-fits-all final solution.