iPad hype
April 24, 2010
Filed under Commentary, Top Stories
For nearly a decade Apple has had rumors of a tablet pc in the works and, after much development comes the iPad. Sadly, it isn’t the beautiful game changing touch screen pc that will revolutionize the entire computer market, instead it is a scaled up version of the safe and familiar iTouch. To be completely fair, this gadget is a marvel of industrial design. The screen is excellent, the shape is suggestive of a sculpture, and even the few buttons always seem to work as they are told. Even the interface is wonderfully intuitive, being accessible to even a 2.5 year old. It is, in effect, just another apple product; beautiful and capable, but for some reason it is nothing more than the sum of its parts.
There is no point while using the device where you suddenly are taken by the sheer brilliance of the thing, because all of its amazing qualities are so familiar. Obviously the biggest criticism is that the iPad is just a larger iTouch. This is very nearly true. It runs the same apps, supports the same features; it even has the general layout of buttons and interface. True, it is slightly more capable than the mobile device, and also true is that it has a whole new set of apps meant for the larger area. However the relative lack of portability as compared to the iTouch makes the iPad a somewhat niche item. This is not necessarily a problem in and of itself, but when the gadget is touted as the revolution of computing it falls a bit short of the expectation.
Apple is often set upon a pedestal as being the ultimate in the theater of industrial design. Not only that but also most people flaunt their products as beacons of reliability and intuition. Cults of Mac users love to tell anyone near a Windows PC how wonderful and clean their computers are. In fact they are correct, Apple products are clean and simple but in near every case they are locked boxes, technologically.
When a product is bought it is universally assumed that the consumer would be able to tweak and work with the various parts within the product. While a large portion of the population is almost completely incapable of operating, let alone maintaining, modern day technology, most of the consumers today are so used to working with tech that soon the base performance is not enough. Apple seems to believe that the former demographic makes up their entire market.
Take for example the issue of the App Store: it is a wonderful mass of cheap apps that improve the iPad far beyond the stock capabilities. However the issue is that all of the apps and prices are filtered and controlled through apple. If you were to want to put a small downloaded app from the internet that looks promising, you couldn’t because of the wall of DRM’s and EULA’s in between. Even trying to put on music from a previous computer onto an apple product is made difficult considering the sole media program for Macs is iTunes. The general rule is that if it isn’t from apple it shouldn’t be on an apple product, ever.
Simply put the iPad, iTouch, or any other apple product will always remain at opposition to the customized and creative world. It might be a small gripe, but if you want to buy a product and then be able to own it as well, don’t buy Apple.