What is revolutionary about the iPad?

by JS

I’m convinced that the iPad is going to create an entirely new market in personal computing devices. I don’t really want to be reductive about why the iPad will do so (but I’m going to anyway). It’s sort of a little piece of the future dropped in our laps (well, not mine, since I’m a poor graduate student — but you know what I mean). If forced, I’d say that the two game changing features are:

  1. The a la carte 3G plan.
  2. The A4 processor.

You’ll note that “a big pane of multitouch glass” is not on the list, even though that is in many ways the reason the iPad seems like a piece of the future. I omitted that feature mostly to be contrarian, but I also suspect that if having a large piece of multitouch glass was the standard, we’d have had iPad type devices in wide use already.

The A4 processor hasn’t really been benchmarked against other device processors, and I’m not really sure it is going to be, but based on the reviews, it does seem like the A4 processor (and indeed the entire iPad computing infrastructure) explores a new part of the power/performance landscape. Power/performance for the form factor and new models of connectivity are what makes it possible to bring panes of multitouch glass to the marketplace as a compelling product.