Steve Jobs: how can you be so brilliant and so clueless at the same time?

My fears have been con­firmed: the rumors of a 7‑inch iPad are only rumors. Steve Jobs has set his foot down and there will nev­er be an Apple device larg­er than the cur­rent iPhone but small­er than the cur­rent iPad.

For all that Apple has going for it in the realm of user expe­ri­ence and user inter­face, how can they be so far off the mark when it comes to ergonom­ics and human mechan­i­cal inter­face issues?

I’m not the first to say this and I won’t be the last. I love my iPad, but it is too bulky and heavy. Jobs is right to say that there is a trade-off between pock­etabil­i­ty and use­ful screen real estate. He’s wrong when he says that the only sweet spots in that trade-off are the 3.5″ screen and the 9.7″ screen.

The iPad almost makes for a decent lap­top replace­ment, but it falls short on util­i­ty. I can’t even use the thing to blog with. Frankly, that’s sad. I have used the iPad in a pinch when I’ve had to fix prob­lems with web­sites, but that’s not say­ing much for the iPad; I’ve done the same with the iPhone (using iSSH to restore downed servers dur­ing a fam­i­ly vaca­tion in Ten­nessee) and my Treo 680 before that.

The iPad isn’t real­ly much more use­ful as an active device than an iPhone is, and is actu­al­ly ham­strung by the lack of mul­ti­task­ing in iOS 3.2. Where the screen real estate helps is in its capa­bil­i­ty as a pas­sive device—for read­ing eBooks, watch­ing movies and so on.

Not every use falls into the easy active/passive divi­sion. Many of the things I use the iPad for—keeping track of per­son­al finances, project time track­ing, and task planning—involve a com­bi­na­tion of read­ing and input. The divi­sion is still valid though: for those tasks involv­ing adding or enter­ing infor­ma­tion, the iPad is not much bet­ter than an iPhone. The advan­tages in screen size come when look­ing at the data—reports, invoic­es, charts and graphs, &c.

Per­haps all this will change when iOS 4 becomes avail­able for the iPad, and we will have a more use­ful device on our hands. But for now, what the iPad is best for is read­ing and watch­ing, not util­i­ty. As such, Job­s’s argu­ment that a small­er screen is «use­less unless you include sand­pa­per so users can sand their fin­gers down to a quar­ter of their size» is spu­ri­ous until the soft­ware catch­es up to the point where there is a need to use our fin­gers for any­thing oth­er than tap­ping the occa­sion­al icon. The iPad as it is now would be improved tremen­dous­ly if it could be held com­fort­ably in one hand for extend­ed peri­ods of time. That means it should be small­er and lighter.

(Side note: small­er and lighter or pos­si­bly just less slip­pery. Adding a case to the iPad actu­al­ly makes it feel lighter because one does­n’t have to grip it as tight­ly in order to keep from drop­ping it.)

Job­s’s state­ment about users need­ing small­er fin­gers is par­tic­u­lar­ly embar­rass­ing com­ing as it does from the cham­pi­on of the blunt point­ing instru­ment. Jobs has con­sis­tent­ly pro­vid­ed us with clum­sy and impre­cise tools for point­ing. First he sad­dled us with the mouse, and now he expects us to use our fin­gers to point at things on a screen with res­o­lu­tion high­er than the human eye can dis­cern. There is a rea­son that in school we are taught to write and draw with pens and pen­cils and expect­ed to leave fin­ger­paint­ing behind by the time we get to kinder­garten. The human hand is a com­plex and high­ly expres­sive organ, but Steve seems to think we’d be bet­ter off writ­ing with our elbows.

If you want to look at sizes for infor­ma­tion entry and dis­play that are already in use, exam­ples are all around us. The iPad is sup­posed to replace the pad of paper, so why not look to the Mole­sk­ine? Mole­sk­ine note­books come in three sizes:  3.5″ by 5.5″, 5″ by 8.25″, and 7.5″ by 9.75″. This can’t pos­si­bly be an exact guide­line because note­books don’t have a bezel. You can write on and read from every inch of the page. For the time being any­how, elec­tron­ic devices will be larg­er than the usable space they provide.

The com­par­i­son is still worth mak­ing: the small­est of Mole­sk­ine note­books is sig­nif­i­cant­ly big­ger than an iPhone, which sug­gests that most of us can agree that the iPhone form fac­tor is less than ide­al for a device which should facil­i­tate creative—or at least productive—work.

The iPad is almost exact­ly the size of the largest Mole­sk­ine. It’s sig­nif­i­cant­ly less thick but much denser—it weighs about twice what the large note­book does. Some peo­ple swear by the largest note­books, but it is worth not­ing that there are two sizes small­er than it, the most pop­u­lar being the medi­um size, 5″ by 8.25″. Even the small­est size is used by mil­lions of peo­ple every day.

It may seem absurd to com­pare paper note­books with a hand­held com­put­er, but these are the items that the iPad is try­ing to replace. It’s per­fect­ly valid to look at the items peo­ple are already car­ry­ing and using to inform our ideas about the ide­al size and weight of their replace­ments. Peo­ple write nov­els on tablets of paper much small­er than the iPad; if the next iPad will have pix­el den­si­ty greater than the eye can dis­cern, why would it need to be larger?

The answer was giv­en by Steve Jobs above: it’s because peo­ple write and draw with pens and pen­cils, and can there­fore express them­selves with the full range of motion and nuance afford­ed by the sty­lus held in a human hand. It’s not that the screen real estate is not use­ful on a sev­en-inch diag­o­nal screen, it’s that Steve Jobs has decid­ed that he does­n’t want a sev­en-inch diag­o­nal screen to be use­ful, so he will force design deci­sions around that idea rather than acco­mo­date a wider range of use-cases. 

Mr Jobs, if you want us to cre­ate works of art and lit­er­a­ture with your devices, why won’t you give us some­thing bet­ter than fin­ger paints to work with?