Yeah, I’m a lit­tle late to the dis­cus­sion. But as I’ve con­tem­plated over past weeks the mer­its of the iPads form and func­tion, try­ing to imag­ine what I’d do with it and what oth­ers might do with it, I keep com­ing back to the same prob­lem: the iPad, nor the iPod or iPhone, sup­port jux­ta­po­si­tion. That’s what all of this whin­ing about mul­ti­task­ing is about. So many things we do on com­put­ers is com­pare, con­trast, and cross-reference between appli­ca­tions, and yet that’s one of the major things the iPad can­not do.

I wish copy and paste were enough, but it’s not. It’s about writ­ing an email about the news arti­cle you have open, or quickly check­ing the sta­tus on some build, or read­ing a dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tion online while you’re writ­ing. You can’t do these things on single-task UIs, because the cost of leav­ing one app, open­ing another, and then return­ing to an app is at least 30 sec­onds. That, and every­thing you might want to jux­ta­pose against has to be kept in your head for these 30 sec­onds. Good luck with that when you’re try­ing to think.

So maybe Apple decided the device wasn’t for think­ing or cre­at­ing. Maybe it’s just for con­sum­ing. But even con­sump­tion takes jux­ta­po­si­tion. I find myself on my iPhone all the time, want­ing to read a Yelp review and see where a place is on the map at the same time.  Because this isn’t pos­si­ble, the Yelp app tries to do maps well, and the Maps app will prob­a­bly try to incor­po­rate reviews, lead­ing to sub­stan­dard expe­ri­ences in both apps. Or, another exam­ple was when I was doing my taxes online: I was ref­er­enc­ing advice in forums about teacher deduc­tions (which I found out I can’t take), while try­ing to decide how to answer a Tur­b­o­Tax ques­tion. On the iPad, I’d have to go back and forth between the two, mem­o­riz­ing all the num­bers and excep­tions in the forum post in order to act upon them in the tax software.

Peo­ple are going to real­ize this soon, too, and Apple’s going to suf­fer for it. Either Apple is just wait­ing for the right time to sup­port jux­ta­po­si­tion, or their design­ers just have no idea how peo­ple pro­duce and con­sume information.