Everyone expects Steve Jobs to unveil a tablet computer today.
I’m sure it will be beautiful, and I’m sure I’ll want one, especially if it’s an amazing tool for making and publishing art.
However, I doubt any Apple tablet will remake society the way the iPhone has.
Here’s why the iPhone is the most disruptive device Apple has ever made:
- The internet in your pants. The iPhone was the first phone with an excellent browser. Now you can’t imagine leaving the house without an always on, location aware, fully awesome internet in your pants.
- Seriously, the “in your pants” thing is important. Like my friend Jin says about cameras, the best tool is the one you have with you. Nobody leaves home without their iPhone. They’ll leave their tablet home most of the time. We’ll all still use our phones, whether we’re tweeting pics of our dinner or documenting state oppression.
- The iPhone supercharged social software and made it mobile, thanks to excellent Twitter apps. I was addicted to Twitter before I had an iPhone, but the iPhone made Twitter the crack of social software. All of a sudden I was using Twitter in restaurants, on the toilet, tweeting drawings, pictures, screenshots, trips, meals, everything. The iPhone also enabled new types of location-aware social software like Foursquare and Gowalla.
- Multitouch + accelerometers transformed how games and tools worked, and how fun software could be. Some kinesthetic magic happens when we’re able to touch, pinch, and tilt software. Some of best paintings I did on my iPhone, and when inspiration strikes my iPhone is always handy.
- Generally speaking, the iPhone completely overwrote my personal patterns, and not just my computing habits, all at once. I even use my iPhone as a tea steep timer and as an alarm clock. I can’t think of any device, even an awesome tablet, that will be able to take over my life like that.
All that said, I’m sure an Apple tablet will be important in digital book publishing (not newspapers though, they’re far too doomed). My hope is that the tablet will make creating and publishing art even easier and more fun than the iPhone already has:
Notes:
Known Microsoft sympathizer Jeff Atwood says “I believe the iPhone will ultimately be judged a more important product than the original Apple Macintosh.” I agree, and if anything Jeff understates the iPhone’s importance.