Recently, I visited a friend of mine that, Jeff, who was thinking about buying a computer. He's never owned one before but uses his partner's Laptop in the evenings to do e-mail, browse Facebook and watch a few YouTube videos. Of course more and more the two find themselves fighting over who gets to use the Laptop and an extra dedicated device would solve the problem. I was there with my iPad and after spending half an hour with it Jeff concluded that this did everything he needed and, since it was cheaper than a MacBook, bought one. He's been glued to it ever since.

This is of course a common tale, and a very encouraging one because an iPad is a lot easier to use and maintain than a Mac. That, combined with the lower price points, mean we have a whole new class of users that are now part of the game. To those users, the Laptop is still the benchmark because it comes down to what this new device can do, more than its specs and features. If Tablets are to truly succeed as a long-term consumer product, they'll have to empower users to similar degrees as traditional Operating Systems have. Simple questions like "can I save the video that was attached to this e'mail" will need to be answered, eventually. Likewise, users will need a way to input text to the device at an acceptable speed, and a way to watch content on it without holding the device up yourself.

One of the major selling point of the iPad, iPhone and iPod, is that they use a completely new type of Operating System to begin with, one that feels nice to use. Starting over is a very rare opportunity in software, even moreso with large companies that actually have a shot at making it work and successfully adopted by the masses. It's common for Applications to support a number of previous platform versions so as not to scare away the customers who don't upgrade every six months. Enhancements always need to be carefully introduced in ways that sacrifice neither present nor future backwards compatibility. If this is true at the platform level, then about about the basic human interaction level? Taking away the keyboard and mouse of a computer should be usually unthinkable. But we were lucky to the timely catalyst of a new technological space.

We now know that Apple first built an iPad before it built an iPhone. It could have built a tablet right away and have it face-off against laptops. But then you'd be looking at re-training your users completely, re-wiring them (or rather un-wiring them), breaking the rules. It's impossible. Paving a new road and writing the rules yourself, however, is somewhat doable. Mobile computing was it. Easier to educate than re-educate. Since users didn't really know yet how to do mobile computing on the go, and since the existing technology had to be adapted anyway, either way users had to learn something new. And once the iPhone was a massive success, everyone already knew how to use the next thing.

The jury is still out as to whether iOS can end up being a better system in itself than OSX, and the broad nature of this comparison ensures that there will probably not be a definitive answer (depends on for whom, etc). But what's certain is that Apple believes in iOS. They believe that it is not just a different experience but also a superior one, and their focus seems single-mindedly on developing the multitouch platform paragidm further. On the hardware side, the updates to the MacBook Pro line -- which used to be the highlight of a Macworld keynote -- are now just a quiet update on the store pages. On the software side, last week the WWDC sessions were mostly focused on iOS while OSX seemed more on the backburner (although reportedly still on track). Recent interviews by Ars Technica of successful Mac developers seem to confirm 10.7 will probably be made closer to iOS in a lot of ways. Maybe it will allow apps to be built that work for both platforms, or make it easier in general to develop for iOS on OSX. But Apple is betting the house on this.

What I'm having a hard time getting past when I try to envision a world where the iOS paragdism wins, is how are we going to address its basic limitations:

• It's a perfect device for viewing content but you always have to hold it up. Laptops have a sturdy platform for a good reason. While travelling last month my fiancee and I would try to use the iPad to watch movies in bed or on airplanes but soon switched back to using the Laptop because it gets tiring to hold the thing up for 2 hours. It's actually heavier than it seems at first. Yes there are iPad cases that work also as stands but the natural form of a Tablet makes this a seemingly impossible problem to solve.
• How do you capture significant amounts of textual input on this thing? How can you write your long report, paper, novel. Sure a Bluetooth keyboard works OK but it's pretty awkward to be typing while sitting away from the screen but having to put your fingers on it to do anything other than what you're currently doing. Tablets will be judged in the long term by what they can do. To the most casual users it will either work as a device that fulfills all their basic requirements or they'll get a Laptop.
• People's files are their things. The lack of access to the filesystem was the first thing I hated about the iPhone. Nowadays I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt because filesystems are messy, terrifying things. Apple doesn't think the benefit of exposing it to the users will be worth the harm. I'm sure they're working on a cloud-based filesystem that will be completely abstracted from the users but there will still be a fundamental problem: users feel that their files are their objects, their things. It's like trying to abstract shelf space or money. And until they're successfull, geeks should get used to answering the question of how to save arbitrary file types that are attached to e-mails and doing something with them.

But even if eventually the multitouch tablet looses steam and becomes a niche product, which I hope it won't, I feel very fortunate that we get to witness such a rare opportunity: the chance to let go of know and start over on fresh, clean ideas that are amount to such a positive experience.