What's that? Not what you wanted? Steve's not listening to you. (Photo by mattbuchanan - (CC))

(Note: my gig at Ableton might tempt you to read between the lines of this post to glean information about upcoming plans. Avoid this temptation. Not only do I not have any info here, I would never suggest or imply anything about future Ableton developments on this website. This disclaimer should be implicit, but this is my personal space.)

By now, every geek this side of Cupertino has weighed in on the iPad. So my attempt to add to the noise could easily be seen as just a crude attempt to cash in on a trending topic for the purpose of leveraging website traffic. Fair enough.

But as a geek with a particular niche interest — computer music technology — I hope to bring some fresh perspective.

There seem to be two dominant reactions to the iPad:

1. It’s a big iPod Touch. What a joke!
2. It’s a big iPod Touch. How awesome!

The WankosphereBlogosphere debates the second half of the realization, but everyone’s basically in agreement about the first half: it’s not a keyboard-less laptop. It’s something much less. Or is it more?

The arguments about “openness” and “extensibility” apply about as much to this device as they apply to the iPhone/iPod Touch, which is to say, they don’t. The market for these devices isn’t hackers. It’s consumers. This is for anyone who wants to sit on the couch and have a simple but functional media experience. It’s for people who don’t want endless possibilities, but rather an elegant and safe set of possibilities.

Now, I’m not afraid to get a little dirty trying to make gadgets do unusual things. But even I have my limits. Every couple years, I try a desktop Linux installation just to get a sense of how far things have come. This usually lasts about an hour. Something is ALWAYS broken, and getting it to work requires near-infinite Googling followed by the editing of scary configuration files. Some people live for this kind of fiddling. I find it boring. I have basically no interest in tools themselves — only as a means to get things done.

And this is why things like the iPad are really exciting for me. Because it’s locked down tighter than an El Al cockpit, you can be pretty sure that there won’t be any fiddling with configuration files. It’s just going to work, period. There are already iPhone apps (like TouchOSC) that do multitouch control of musical applications over Wi-Fi. I can’t imagine it will take long for these applications to appear on the iPad as well. Until now, the only viable multitouch controller for computer music applications was a boutique item called the Lemur. It’s gorgeous, powerful and completely unaffordable for most mortals. Now the iPad is here and, at about a quarter of the Lemur’s cost, stands to bring usable multitouch to a price point that many musicians can reach.

Yes, Apple fosters a closed, monopolistic ecosystem. But they also make tools that work. This is important for people who want to get stuff done, and perhaps less important for people who want to sit around and polish their tools.

If you’re still not convinced, consider this: would there be an ever-expanding field of iPhone competitors if the iPhone wasn’t such a game-changer? Perhaps even more important than the iPad itself is the fact that laptop-sized multitouch is about to become a real market segment. For some, this might be exciting because it means more tools and more fiddling. For me, it’s exciting because it promises more ways to get stuff done.