The missing quality

The iPad is an amazing, culture-changing tool–as long as you don't drop it | Joel Belz

Illustration by Krieg Barrie

I had an opportunity a few days ago to spend a whole half hour with a brand new iPad. To say that it's a remarkable little tool is a vast understatement. It is culture-changing—on the order of moveable type, the Linotype, and the original Macintosh computer that came out in 1984.

If you think my three examples show my prejudice for the field of publishing, I will quickly agree. But it's the main field in which I can speak from experience. And from that experience, I can also tell the experts at Apple exactly where their iPad—astonishing as it is—is still deficient.

The iPad, like all of its competitors, won't be perfect until it is droppable. The engineers need to build into these amazing little gizmos the same quality that newspapers, magazines, and books have had for years. The issue of WORLD magazine you're reading right now—unless you're online, like any of the 100,000-plus people who use our web content every month—has that critical attribute the geeks in Silicon Valley have so far apparently ignored. Drop this copy of WORLD, and it's none the worse for such wear.