So Apple finally revealed the iPad this morning, and at last the unbearable hype that had been building up over ten years finally met reality. What followed was the sound of millions of keyboards across the world (mostly physical keyboards) being smashed as journalists, bloggers and everyone else made their feelings about it known. And one of the most common themes cropping up was ‘iPad = Fail’.

Perhaps it’s simply a sign of the times – the success and ubiquity of Failblog.org has allowed the word to enter the vernacular as a pejorative noun rather than a verb – but the underlying sentiment is that Apple spectacularly missed the mark with the iPad. I feel like I’m in the overwhelming minority in saying that Apple did precisely the right thing, and will likely be vindicated in the near future.

For starters, Apple (and Steve Jobs in particular) did not help matters through their reliance rigid silence and controlled leaks to fuel the fires of anticipation. Jobs’ claim that the product would be ‘the most important thing’ he’d ever done appears wildly irrational, even delusional. But in many ways, he had a point – the iPad was the culmination of several of the huge successes he’d had with Apple, from the Mac right through to the iPod and iPhone.*

When the iPod was first released in 2001, the reaction on Slashdot was infamously lukewarm (‘No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.’), and broadly reflective of the prevailing sentiment towards this strange device within the tech community. But in any case, it was a Mac-only niche product. Apple was a small-time white elephant computer company, that had failed in its quest to compete against the dominant Windows platform. No one in the mainstream really cared until three years later, when the iPod (now with full Windows support and an online music store) was recognised as a runaway success. Fast forward another three years to 2007, when the hype machine once again built in anticipation of the iPhone. Again, despite some positive response to the new UI, the iPhone was roundly criticised for not having 3G or any custom apps or a removable battery, being too expensive, and lacking Flash and copy/paste. The pundits and Apple’s competitors were particularly fierce in criticising Apple for attempting to enter a saturated market in which it had no prior expertise. Within a couple of years, they were once again proven wrong, thanks to Apple’s small steps in meeting those concerns over subsequent revisions of the iPhone and its SDK, and the fact they completely overlooked the significance of its killer app (mobile internet).

Which brings us to the massive disappointment that is apparent amongst so many today. Following the domination of the iPod and the incredible success of the iPhone against all expectations, this was the first major Apple product release in recent times to be so widely anticipated in the mainstream. While I can generally understand the sentiment of most tech geeks, Apple fanboys or news journalists – who either had completely unrealistic expectations or don’t know any better – I can’t help but be gobsmacked by the lack of vision shown by industry bloggers (particularly Engadget, Gizmodo, or other tech journalists complaining about the lack of multitasking and other features). They’ve seen this sort of thing happen before – having witnessed Apple’s classic tactic penetrating the market through evolutionary features in the first few revisions of a product accompanied by aggressive and well-timed price cuts. To be as wildly disparaging as a great many people have been may very well end up fulfilling David Pogue’s (one of the few exceptions) prophecy – ‘As we enter Phase 2, remember how silly you all looked when you all predicted the iPhone’s demise in that period before it went on sale.’

So why am I so confident the iPad will succeed? Dismissing it as a ‘big iPod Touch’ / ‘iPhone without the phone’ / ‘laptop without a keyboard’ completely misses the point. Why should Apple release a OS X based tablet that would cannibalise its laptop sales, or a larger-screened 3G-enabled iPod Touch that would kill demand for iPhones? Moreover, why would anyone who already owned a laptop or iPhone want to replace them with such a device? Apple stated that its intention was to fill in a ‘third category’ of mobile devices, and I believe the importance of the iPad’s release is that regardless of whether or not the current device fits this category, the iPad product family (and its competitors) eventually will.

The device we have seen is not intended to be the killer of the modern PC – but it is the harbinger of the PC’s doom (its death may yet be well off, but has certainly begun). And it may become a real threat to the Netbook market. As it is, the iPad is price competitive with many Netbooks. For now, there are certainly things that a Netbook or laptop still do better – particularly text input through a physical keyboard, video conferencing using a front-facing camera, multitasking, storage and data input through USB/SD/Optical. But, as anyone who knows Apple’s MO should be well aware, over time each of these advantages will be whittled away through software updates and hardware features added to subsequent revisions of the product. Multitasking in particular is likely to make an appearance in iPhone OS 4.0 – I’m not sure how substantial a difference it would make anyway, given the effectiveness of the limited multitasking already present in the iPhone OS.

In the meantime, there will undoubtedly a great many early adopters for whom these won’t matter as much as they would be satisfied with the first batch of features – whose patronage will give Apple the ability to bring newer, more fully-featured versions to the mass-market at a progressively lower price. The missing features will come to the device eventually, or they may not even matter.

I believe the killer app that is being overlooked this time was revealed by Phill Schiller – not iBooks, but iWork. More specifically, the improved hardware that facilitates the ability to create, edit and manipulate documents through multitouch using iWork. Sure, it’s not a lot to look at right now, and appears to be far inferior to the content creation process on a traditional PC/laptop/Netbook, but the underlying concept is the transition of content creation from the traditional Desktop OS paradigm to one that is more tightly controlled (for better or worse) within a smartphone/mobile device. Now that the iPad platform has been established and the SDK released, I imagine it won’t be long before more sophisticated, dedicated apps for content creation are developed for it – just as they were for the iPhone. It may start with Apple bringing iLife to the iPad, and may even go as far as Microsoft Office (or an adequate alternative) appearing on it and finally creating a viable alternative to a laptop. Dedicated photo or video editing apps could easily find their way onto the iPad platform, and the multitouch interface provides the potential for a whole new way of manipulating, interacting with and editing such content.

What that means for any of us right now, faced with the proposition posed by the current device as it stands, will obviously vary from person to person. In fact, most of us with iPhones and Netbooks/PC laptops/Macbooks, may very well not need one right now. But that is almost entirely irrelevant. The device is perfect for a very significant, largely untapped market of people who have digital lives but lack the time or savvy to organise or coordinate them in a convenient way. It is an evolution of the concept that Steve Jobs brought to Apple on his return in 1997, and has informed almost everything he has done since – the ‘digital hub’. The short-term endgame is that iPads (or their ilk) will soon become a far more attractive alternative for a large segment of the market who simply don’t need a dedicated Netbook/laptop, but will happily carry around a device that meets their basic digital needs in an elegant (and cost-effective) manner. And then, once the product matures, the rest of us will jump in and embrace it as a ‘third’ category of mobile device.

All of this may be conjecture, but it is informed by Apple’s past product strategies and the subsequent market response. It is entirely possible that Apple may fail with the iPad if the market does not respond in the way Apple expects. But to suggest that the iPad is a ‘fail’, or that Apple has shot itself in the foot by deliberately overlooking ‘what people want’, is to make the same underestimation that makes us laugh with hindsight at that Slashdot comment of nine years ago. Time will tell.