TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Joshua Blankenship thinks the iPad is mostly just for consumption:

At its core, the iPad is a consuming machine, not a creating machine (at least in its currently presented iteration.) Yes, I understand there are quite a few of those 140,000 apps in the App Store that allow people to create and share, but only under very specific constraints. And not nearly on the level that I can with my laptop.

But the iPad is not designed to fill my desire to create, it’s mainly designed for me to consume the creations of others. It will change the landscape of personal computing and find its way into the hands of a ridiculous amount of people who are very happy to simply consume. My hands just won’t be among them anytime soon. I have too much creating to do.

Blankenship’s basic argument is that the iPad is, even though you can create on it using iWork or third-party applications, primarily for consumption because of its constraints. You can’t type on it as well. The hardware is limited. The UI possibilities are limited.

The first isn’t really a limitation — you can use a keyboard. The third will change in time (a 2 GHz iPad would be perfectly capable of doing all kinds of work). The third is the only real limitation of note.

But I think this misses the point.

Blankenship is defining “creative” work very narrowly, and inaccurately. A touch UI may limit certain kinds of work — for example, no matter what, a Photoshop-like application with the same depth of features may never work — but he’s limiting creative work to kinds that seem dependent on a windows-based and mouse-driven UI: Photoshop design, photography, video editing, application and web development, et cetera.

These aren’t the only kinds of creative work.1 Drawing and painting are ideally-suited to a touch tablet. There’s no reason you can’t write just as effectively on a tablet than on a regular computer (and with Hockenberry’s point, there’s good reason to think you’ll write better). Architects would certainly benefit from being able to create new building designs anywhere they get inspiration, or even edit the design on site while it’s being constructed. Teachers and students would benefit immeasurably from textbooks, the web, and iWork all on one device. Doctors could finally get rid of the rooms full of paperwork and their clipboards. Campaign workers can carry it with them, house to house, to show people their campaign materials, sign them up for the campaign, and log their response. And…

You get the idea. The iPad might be limited for the types of creation that we in the creative professional community are used to, but this isn’t the only kind of creative work people do. There’s all kinds, kinds that you and I might not be able to conceive right now but someone else can, a kind that a computer that weighs 1.5 pounds and can be carried around anywhere a magazine can will enable.

That’s what the iPad is all about. This isn’t about consumption. This is about opening up the future.

1. And, really, some of these may work even better in a touch-based UI. Video editing, photography, and application/web development all seem on first blush to either work fine in a touch UI, or in an improved manner. [↩]