My iPad arrived at 10:30 a.m. E.T. on the day it was supposed to, Saturday, April 3. I remember the time because I had just looked impatiently at my clock, wondering, Where is it?, when the UPS man buzzed my doorbell. Perhaps it wasn’t quite like the birth of a child — this baby has got to perform tricks immediately, and there’s precious little time to grow up.
I am anxious, of course, because I have deep roots in dead-tree media and still take substantial nourishment from it. With the publishing industry in a depression, Apple’s latest innovation has been hailed as a potential savior: the entry point for print to become a whole new medium while preserving its essential identity. Since TIME’s iPad app was also debuting on Saturday, it would be the first app I would download. . I love the Touch’s handiness and the fact that, beyond carrying my entire iTunes library of everything from Rachmaninoff to Lady Gaga, it also has the neat Amazon Kindle app that lets me upload War and Peace . But the extra real estate does make a difference. The Touch was convenient. The iPad is intimate. Its weight, though only about a pound and a half, gives it gravity and a sense that it should be more than simply useful. And the iPad that’s on sale now will continue to evolve as Apple works on its design and as consumers offer their reactions to the way it delivers content.
So this is not a story of instant gratification. Even on a more mundane level, you don’t get instant gratification with the iPad. By the end of that night, I decided to rent a couple of movies. But you can’t just do so and watch in an instant. Forty-five minutes after ordering the director’s cut of Donnie Darko, I gave up and went to sleep, letting that movie and Dune
