Apple vs. Twitter

After months and months of endless, endless speculation and rumors, Apple today introduced its new tablet, the iPad. It's intended to create a "third segment" between full-featured computers and netbooks on the one hand, and the smartphone/iPod touch group on the other. As you'd expect from Apple, the thing looks beautiful - a super-thin, 10" slip that's pretty much all screen and no mess. And since it starts at $500 and will offer all sorts of functions, including a keyboard-stand thing that helps with the eternal problem of how you type on the thing you're looking at, I'm sure it'll sell approximately one billion copies.

I don't want one.

I don't mean I don't appreciate it, or that I've given up on Apple products - I own two Macs and an iPod, after all, and when any of them die I will almost certainly replace them with more Apple gear. But between the overwhelming hype, the self-satisfied noise coming from the Apple machine and the simple fact that the tablet does absolutely nothing that my current stable of consumer electronics doesn't, I just don't find myself having fantasies about Owning the New as when Apple introduced new items in the past. Maybe I'm growing up... or, more likely, I'm realizing that my graduate student budget is a bit tight and will remain that way for the foreseeable future.

But there's something else that worries me about it as well. During the endless parade of rumors that led up to today, there was a debate between people who thought that the iPad would be a real laptop substitute running a modified version of OS X and people who thought it would be a giant iPhone with locked-in operating software and a carefully-policed collection of approved apps for purchase. It's very much the latter: the software is hardwired in, which means that - aside from the few hardcore modders who will inevitably jailbreak the device - all iPad users will be doing nothing with their devices that's not in some fashion specifically approved by Apple.

That's not such a problem if you're talking about a peripheral mobile device - your iPhone or iPod Touch. But the iPad is clearly not designed to be another peripheral mobile device. Its capabilities - email, photos, movie-watching, music-playing, web-surfing - are clearly designed to appeal to the majority of computer users whose needs don't go beyond those categories. The iPad is a shot across the bow of the enormous cheap-laptop market - and if the success of Apple's other products are any indication, that shot across the bow will very quickly be followed by a barrage of shots fired directly into the engine room. The iPad has the potential not only to cannibalize the sales of netbooks, but to force other manufacturers to adopt similar strategies.

And that's a problem, because Apple's business plan here relies on extreme centralization. While there's some creativity in app design, all apps have to be approved and sold through Apple. The operating software is proprietary, and coded into the device. It's a closed ecosystem - a safer pond, perhaps, but also a much less free one. And if the iPad is a success and inspires rivals, and that's the future of personal computers, it's a bit scary - partly because I instinctively dislike the idea of centralized control over personal computing, and partly because I think it will go some distance towards stifling user and competitor creativity.

It's exactly the opposite strategy of my perennial bugbear, Twitter. As this Wired article shows. Twitter is founded upon the principle of "radical openness," meaning that users are encouraged to define the system. I still dislike Twitter, for reasons I've laid out before, but I like its philosophy - it's open and (arguably) democratic where Apple is inarguably closed and undemocratic. Granted, Twitter is software and Apple is hardware, and there are fundamental differences between the two, not least of which being that it's sort of difficult to open-source hardware development. But until now, the personal computer industry has had plenty of success selling machines which are anything but closed ecosystems. And the experimentation and customization that those systems allowed set the stage for open-sourced developments like Twitter, Linux and Wikipedia. Open-sourcing is, to my mind, one of the great success stories of the last decade, and one which has brought the world much more benefit than loss - even accounting for Ashton Kutcher's tweetage.

I don't think it's reasonable to argue that the iPad directly threatens open-sourcing. But if it's the runaway success Apple clearly hopes it is and inspires competitors to develop similar systems, I think it could be a bad omen for it. And it would be doubly a shame for that trend to die down, and for its killer to be wearing an Apple logo.

So no iPad for me. And if anyone wants to talk to me about it, I'll be off in the corner watching movies on an old-fashioned computer with a separate keyboard and screen.