After years of banging the same drum I still find myself speaking about the iPhone and iPad phenomena as if they were objects, to be judged on their merits as hunks of metal and glass. The speed, heft, resolution and tactile qualities are, of course, vital ingredients in the user experience, but when you weigh up the competition and find the screens and memory modules are largely manufactured by the same few companies you should start to reach the conclusion that judging the iPad by it's hardware is akin to judging a meal by the chopsticks. They are vital to the experience, of course, but without a kitchen full of cooks your shiny chopsticks would only really be useful for putting your hair up in a pretty bun.
I thought of a more appropriate analogy by which to explain this point if view. Back in the day a certain kind of company would try to think of a stylish (or in Japan, "cute") and innovative way to display your toilet roll in the hopes that you'd be won over by the design, buy the product and never hear of the company again. Nowadays mobile phone companies, internet service providers and satellite TV companies have shown us that taking a one-off payment makes no sense when they could feasibly keep squeezing you for micro- payments at regular intervals. That's why the smart company nowadays sells a system for the customer to buy into or subscribe to. If you want to use our products you have to use our proprietary mics and controllers (Sony), our vacuum cleaner bags (Dyson) or our coffee sachets (Kenco). In the case of this toilet roll the makers thought of the problems faced by large institutions trying to provide facilities to hundreds of people. Namely, the need for a janitor stalking the halls to check there was toilet paper in each cubicle. That or they needed to able to trust their guests not to steal the precious rolls. The system in the photos above saves the buyer thousands of dollars a year in man-hours by locking the toilet roll up behind bars. When the roll is gone, the bar can be lifted and the next roll released from its cage. This is accomplished by the master step of the system: you don't use normal toilet rolls with a cardboard tube in the centre. You manufacture your own, tube-less roll. The client has to buy your roll giving you a residual income. The buyer doesn't need to pay for as many man hours as the roll-refreshing burden has been spread between yourself, the manufacturer, and the customer. The customer doesn't begrudge the manufacturer the cost of the proprietary rolls because he would've had to buy from someone anyway. By doing away with "the keeper of the sheets" you have locked the buyer into your system. If the buyer wants to use an open system he is welcome to dispense with the system, buy a standard holder, search around for a trustworthy toilet roll manufacturer and hire someone to change or guard the rolls for him. But having tried the holistic approach, what kind of company would go back to doing things piecemeal? And that's why you should be thinking about owning an iPhone or an iPad. Not for the touch screen tablet, which will shortly become a dime a dozen, but for the system you're buying into; you need a well- though out app store with standardized design and interface principles. You need some kind of basic framework in which developers can work to make any use of your touch screen. Without that, who's going to keep your sheets? Perhaps you'd like to QA every stall while managing your company? And that's why you should be thinking about your tablet purchase not as an object, but as an ecosystem. Buy "a tablet" or buy into Apple's app store?