Tappin’ the glass

Like it or hate it, Apple has sig­ni­fic­antly changed the way we inter­act with our devices and media.

iWhatever devices have come to define the stand­ard to which oth­er hard­ware developers aspire. Soft­ware developers have, in droves, switched dev. teams to Xcode and Object­ive C.

And this is not a bad thing, regard­less of what you think of Apple’s closed sys­tem of the iTunes store or of Steve Jobs fan-appoin­ted pos­i­tion of tech­no­logy messiah.

Because, and for me this reas­on really res­on­ates, Apple is tak­ing a pos­i­tion of an ‘Industry Lead­er ™’ regard­less of the con­sequences. And isn’t that the role of lead­ers? To blaze the trail and believe that it’s the best way for­ward, and that people will follow?

Sure, there are many issues with the details, yet, I can’t ignore the fact that I’ve got 7 Apple devices (8 if you include the Apple //e in my base­ment) in my house­hold. How ‘bout you?? 🙂

Yet, daily I work and write on PC devices run­ning Win­dows. So what is it that attracts us to the ‘magic’ of Apple?

Design? Sure, Apple has had this cornered since the Lisa days. While they’ve been chal­lenged, they’ve rarely been bested.

Yet, with the evol­u­tion from iPhone/iPod Touch to iPad, there is some­thing miss­ing. Ref­er­ences to the iPod Touch as the iPad Nano are com­mon. Yes, it’s a much big­ger screen with more poten­tial, but we’re not see­ing it yet.

The iPad has a very weird niche between that of a func­tion­al laptop and a cas­u­al media brows­ing device. And yet, it is engaging.

Basic­ally I’m think­ing the killer app for the iPad has yet to be released. Vis­iC­alc was the Tip­ping Point for the Apple // line. I’m won­der­ing what it’ll be for the iPad. Whatever it is, it’s got a nar­row win­dow to appear. Oth­er­wise Nin­tendo or Sony or Asus or HP or Dell will fig­ure it out.

Got some thoughts on that? Leave them in the comments!

This post of is one of many I pub­lish weekly at the Future Shop Techb­log. Read more of my stuff here.