iPad: Steve’s Mona Lisa

It’s been almost a decade since Steve Jobs showed us how to fit 1,000 songs in our pocket and four short years since he transformed our cell phone into, well, almost anything. From GPS to a metronome, the iPhone does it all, thanks to those wonderful apps. Early April marks the launch of what will become Jobs’ most amazing achievement: Apple’s iPad.

Critics are quick to note everything the iPad is not, wondering if there is a market for such an odd device with such an odd name. But while pointing out what it is not, they miss the point of what it is. Simply put: It’s the modern-day printing press. With the iPad, we’ll receive virtually all of our communications from this singular, lean-back device. Our newspaper and magazines are in there, as well as all our TV, music, and movies. It contains our emails and appointments and contacts. The iPad puts it all in our hand and then, with the advent of its truly amazing and futuristic interface, lets you control it all with your hands! This is the beginning of the end of the keyboard. Mouse, we hardly knew you these few decades. VHS, DVD, BlueRay, goodbye. Even the beloved TV remote will be replaced.

At first, this change will seem to happen slowly. So slowly in fact that many are calling the iPad nothing more than a large iPhone, thinking this is just an evolutionary change. But, in very small revelations, we begin to see the innovation and the future. For example, when you slide a picture into the iPad’s word processor application, you can resize it by pinching it larger or smaller, as every iPhone user knows. But then you can instantly make other pictures match its size and format by touching the first picture with one hand and then touching each of the others with your other hand. With this feature, your hands just formatted a document quicker and more accurately than any other device could. For countless tasks, the iPad—a powerful computer held in your hand and controlled by your hand —will be the best at getting things done.

There is no longer a medium between you and what you create. No more mouse to click or keys to find—not even a pen or pencil to hold. We have come full circle, back to the caveman days, when we were drawing with our fingers. And all those wonderful apps will keep our fingers busy doing everything from formatting pictures to visually planning our next vacation, moving through the country with our fingers or a twist of our iPad and reserving hotels along the way. Apple’s newest patent adds video detection to the navigation mix, allowing you to wave your hand over a camera lens to turn a page, tap the lens to close an app, or flash a sign to launch a web site. Other features include touch control, gyroscopes, and the quickly improving voice recognition. With all this innovation, children born today will not be typing their high school term papers, they will be creating them using hands, voice, and gestures to express themselves in ways the best of us now struggle to.

This change is real. When the iPod launched, no one predicted that music stores would disappear in just a few years, but they did. The iPad will do the same to industry after industry, from cable TV to newspapers, bringing artists and consumers closer.

Steve Jobs cocreated the personal computer. After Apple thanked him by kicking him out of his own company, he went on to create one of the most powerful business computers. From there, he started a little company called Pixar, which brought you everything from Toy Story to that silly hopping lamp and eventually landed him as the largest shareholder of the Disney Company. And then he returned home to save his dying Apple, fitting it with computers that were again the envy of the industry. To complete his second act, he transformed the music industry with iTunes and then the phone industry with the iPhone. Now he’s about to transform the way we communicate and create. He is truly the Thomas Edison or Leonardo da Vinci of our time, and the iPad is his Mona Lisa—his greatest creation. And that is really saying something.