Yes, that's a bold claim, and I admit a fair amount of hyperbole, but I say it that way to indicate how big I think the iPad will be.
Computers today aren't super easy to use. I mean, they're not too bad, but they could be easier. The apps themselves are okay. Browsers are pretty straight-forward. Email is okay. Word processors, well, over-featured, but straight-forward.
It's the rest of the stuff that's unnecessarily complicated. The stuff that you don't actually want to do, but you have to spend a lot of time doing.
Finding software. Buying software. Installing software. Managing your documents, pictures, music. Updating software. Uninstalling software. Dealing with your computer slowing down over time. Figuring out which of your apps is going crazy and slowing down all the other apps. Let's look at these one by one.
Finding software: browse the inifinite web, or buy it at retail. If you know where to look, you can find app catalog sites or app review sites, which help organize the info. I'm pretty technical, and I don't really know any of them by name.
Buying software: pay at retail, or pay at each website's own shopping cart, where you re-enter in all your credit card info.
Installing software: Why should we have to choose what directory to install a piece of software? Especially when all the OS's have a default place where probably 99% of the software expects to be installed (/Applications for Mac OS X, C:\Program Files\ for Windows).
Managing docs: You have to choose where to save those things. Everything is a file: your photos are files, your word docs are files, your mp3's are files. You have to mentally map between the file icon, and between what the icon represents.
Updating software: Each program has their own "check for update" menu item. Some update the software directly. Others send you to the website to see if there's anything new.
Uninstalling software: Do you trust software to uninstall itself properly?
Computer slowing down: Why does Windows slow down so much over time? No one really knows, but I'm guessing it's because software doesn't uninstall itself properly.
Multiple apps: Running multiple apps means you have to make sure they don't interfere with each other.
Techies, like myself, are used to dealing with stuff that like. Techies pay attention to even the tiniest detail. We notice everything that changes on the screen. We remember what things looked like last time we ran the program, so we instantly notice changes. Heck, we even get used to the sound of the computer when it's chugging along and think "hm, the hard drive is making more noise than usual, something must be going on."
What about people who are, well, just normal people? Have you ever seen someone have 50 windows open, because they lost track of what windows they had open? Have you seen people on Mac OS X who don't realize that they have 10 apps open because the only on-screen indication is that the top-screen menu looks different. The menu is 22-pixels high; that's a small fraction of the resolution that monitors can do nowadays.
What about the mouse? It's not that hard, but it requires a certain bit of hand coordination. Left click, right click, click and drag. Have you ever ctrl-dragged a file to copy it, and had to pause a second to make sure you released the correct finger first? If you release the left finger from ctrl before releasing the mouse button, you've just moved the file instead of copying it.
What about people who have never used a computer before? My dad once had to train an elderly woman to use the mouse. She would gingerly move the mouse until the pointer was over what she wanted to press. Then, she would take her hand off the mouse, and use her index finger to press the mouse button, which would of course then shift the mouse enough that it wouldn't click on what she intended.
Now, all these things, you eventually learn how to deal with them. You have to, in order to effectively use a computer nowadays. But it shouldn't be like that.
Let's look at the iPad. Or rather, let's look at the iPhone first.
Finding software: use the app store.
Buying software: use the credit card you have on file.
Installing software: It installs itself, and puts an icon on the screen. No prompting, doesn't ask the location.
Managing docs: Docs are stored within the programs themselves. You don't deal with files, you deal with the objects themselves. In a word processor app, you have documents. You browse photos by, well, looking at the photo.
Updating software: Update them all at once in the app store "Updates" screen.
Uninstalling software: You press and hold, and see a little "X" show up. Click it, and the app disappears, all traces of it gone.
Multiple apps: Can't do it, so not much to worry about!
Mouse: If you think about it, the mouse is really an abstraction between what you want to do, and how you actually achieve it. You shouldn't have to move an object to move a pointer to point to the thing you want to click on. You should just be able to click on the damn thing. And with a touchscreen, you can.
Using an iPhone just throws out all the fiddly annoying things that you shouldn't need to do, but have to. Wouldn't it be great if you could throw all that stuff out on your normal computer as well?
Well, the iPad is, after all, a really big iPhone. (It's more than that actually, but it's also a very big iPhone). So all these benefits also carry over to the iPad. The iPad has a nice big screen, so you actually get close to the real estate of your normal computer.
Now, are there things that the iPad can't do? Sure, of course. It can't do video encoding, can't video conference, can't do Photoshop. Do you do that all the time? If so, then you probably have a honking powerful computer that is great for that.
Given those limitations, how can I say that the iPad will change the face of computing as we know it? My answer is, it will make computers more accessible to the majority of Normal People than the current computers. It does away with the management of the computer for the people who really don't care about that part. The iPad is great for the 80% of people out there who like to read and send email, browse the web, shop at Amazon, watch youtube and TV, listen to music, look at photos. It's the Computer for the Rest of Us.
Even us techies, we probably spend a fair amount of our time doing those things as well. And if there are things that you can't do on it, you use your other computer. And that other computer can have a different user interface, different input devices, multiple monitors, extra hard drives. The two models can co-exist. I don't think the iPad is intended to be your only computer, but for some people, it may be.
The iPad is just the first device. I anticipate that this approach to simplicity, this "new face of computing" as I call it, will come to other devices. Apple won't have a strangehold on it. We'll see other tablets that do similar things. The concept will carry over in some way to desktops and laptops, especially if Google's Chrome OS has a say. But the iPad is first, and by introducing this model, it's going to change the world.
-J
