Watching the New York Times, CNN, and others (recently GQ in the ads on Ars Technica) embrace the iPad so wholeheartedly, I wondered why they were doing it. What was so awesome about the device that publishers would embrace it in a way that they had never approached a tablet any time in the previous decade? I think the answers are all “design” and “control.”
The iPad is not a commodity. There will be only one manufacturer, one overall design, and one software environment. Although six models are being offered, they differ only in storage and network connection, neither of which have any bearing on the resources available to run actual apps. Effectively, any iPad is the one and only iPad from an app’s point of view.
The processor is always an Apple A4 at a single clock speed; the memory is always 256 MB; the screen is always 1024×768×32 and always driven by the A4’s integrated PowerVR chip; and your app is single-tasked, so the crapware a typical PC has will never slow it down and darken your good name. The only real variable is whether the screen is portrait or landscape, and even that only alters your dimensions by 33%. Unlike unrestricted PC hardware, which could be running anything from my venerable 5:4 monitor to a (comically short) 16:9 widescreen—to a 700×500 window stuffed in the corner of a much larger desktop.
All this, combined with the fact that iPad apps are not mired in the matrix of browser capabilities and technologies of the Web, gives designers a tighter set of constraints to work with, which allows them to produce designs that much better suited for the target device. It’s so much better to design in a framework of either-or than “anything from 800 to 2560 pixels wide, and whatever you do, IE will mess it up.”
iPad publishers also gain a measure of control over their content when it’s not on the Web, vulnerable to deep linking and copypasta aggregators like Google News. For additional control, I would bet Apple did the same for publisher’s apps as they did for iBooks, letting the publisher set the price rather than taking Amazon’s hardline “$9.99 or no Kindle sales for you!” stance. Finally, on competing platforms, there is a common DRM scheme in use platform-wide, which makes the payoff associated with cracking it much higher. A successful crack of a common system opens the entire platform. Whereas an app for each publication may only compromise a single app/publisher when a weakness is discovered.
So overall, the iPad is a much more attractive proposition for traditional publishers than the current crop of competitors. This will most likely remain true over time, as Android/WebOS knockoffs will try to out-spec each other in a race for the nerdiest audience, totally neglecting the other benefits that the iPad offers to developers. Both in traditional media, and in new development.
