Apple has finally unveiled its tablet, but why should you care?
Apple is about as responsible in the computing world as a fat kid is in a candy store.
All ye whose faith wavers, bow down before the almighty Apple: it has released a giant iPhone.
Impressed? I wasn’t. Despite the fact that consumers time and again reject things that are big and bulky, Mac now tests the faithful to see just how much bulk they’ll buy. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a solid marketing move. The “Macommunists,” as I like to call them and a term some of them have coined for themselves, will essentially eat whatever Steve Jobs puts on a plate. And with such a clever name as “iPad,” who wouldn’t? Steak, rat poison, something more colorful, you get the idea. If I had a loyal userbase of people who would buy whatever I wanted them to, basically, I would milk them dry.
Tablet PCs may have existed for a decade, but how many of them have you actually seen outside of an artist’s studio? The idea here is to bring it to the people, replete with on-screen keyboard, Safari browser and “more bigger iPhone-ness,” as no other descriptive phrase or word comes to mind.
Jobs claimed at the MacWorld conference that this would be the best possible browsing experience you could imagine. I don’t know, I can imagine a pretty good one, and it doesn’t involve you, Mr. Jobs. He then showed a picture of the tablet flipped on its side and explained that no matter how you turn it, it always faces up. I was still fazed by the name.
Perhaps a more fitting moniker than the utterly dull iPad could have been drummed up, which depending on your accent could sound a lot like “iPod.” Good thing I only know one guy from Massachusetts.
My vision of the future includes an iPad sitting on a desk, propped up by an OSX book: Its permanent home as a 9.7-inch digital photo frame replete with a steaming cup of buyer’s regret.
Shifting gears for a moment, perhaps what’s more alarming is Jobs’ attempt to woo the old print media dinosaurs the same way he wooed the music industry. In the end, he ended up controlling the individual pricing of songs, and the concept of the album was forced right out the window. Yet this is the one thing I will credit Jobs for: the music industry no longer has to worry about file sharing and constantly declining sales profits.
Perhaps in this same model, as a benevolent benefactor, he could return the print industry back to higher profits. They’d have to make change, of course, and cease their free content on the Web. What I don’t understand is why it’s so iPad-centric; this is the sort of change that could happen easily on computers with current Web browsers. What the iPad does offer is a way to digitally distribute current print mediums in a way that’s both attractive and by some people’s estimates, clever, still necessitating the need for high quality layouts.
Make no mistake, however — the iPad is not a desktop or even a laptop replacement, it has a specific set of goals and abilities: Mac is not cannibalizing its market by competing with its regular line of computers. You are afforded less ability than either a Macbook or an iPhone; it is neither a phone nor does it possess all of the capabilities of a computer. iPads come sans-USB and Firewire Ports and can only have a maximum of 64GB of solid state storage, which thus far has proven an industry flop. The fact that it has an LED screen and sells for the original price of the iPhone seems to speak well to Apple’s marketing department. They’re trying to create a market somewhere between a laptop and iPhone, and I just don’t think it exists.
I’m not a bigot; it’s just that for so long in the computer industry Macs have been the running joke: Simple computers that can’t do a whole lot and disable the end-user purposefully. Putting a UNIX core in OSX helped, but Mac’s idea of innovation never seems to be to allow you to do more, only allow you to do it in a different way, which,
coincidentally, is a basic extrapolation of its former slogan.
Mac will still utterly dominate your experience with this device from the sale of applications to proprietary connection hardware. I’m still waiting for the day they set their customers free and allow them to compute on what they’ve purchased as they see fit: I do not subscribe to the Cult of Mac. As a curiosity, I will be interested to see what Linux OS springs up to make better use of this hardware without the restrictions.
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