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?