Everyone’s got it! It’s the next big thing, computing reinvented, or it’s a piece of junk! Nothing more than a sized-up iPod touch!
The Macalope is pointedly pro-iPad and this week he waxes poetic again, so if that’s not your cup of tea, just close the lid of your laptop now. If you’re using a desktop computer, just angrily shove your monitor off your desk.
Corporate IT shops, of course, won’t much care for the iPad. And what about that name? Apple doesn’t even fully own it yet! Oh, the nerve! The cheek! The audacity! The other words in the thesaurus! It’s enough to give a noted technology pundit a bad case of the vapors!
Shameless boosterism
You’re going to have to forgive the Macalope. He fully admits he’s got pro-iPad derangement syndrome. Sorry, but have you seen his head? What did you expect when Apple came out with something that’s his diminutive but precocious relative?
The problem the horny one has with the detractors is they are almost exclusively arguing about specific features the iPad lacks—Flash, a camera, an SD card slot, bladdity, bladdity. “A netbook has all these things! And costs less!” It’s true! Guess what? This isn’t a netbook replacement! It’s something completely different.
Mike Monteiro sees it.
The iPad isn’t the future of computing; it’s a replacement for computing.
It’s the payoff to all the work done by multiple industries over the last 20–30 years. It’s the subtraction of 20lbs of textbooks in my son’s backpack, and the device I finally feel comfortable buying my parents.
Andy Ihnatko had a terrific analogy on the latest edition of MacBreak Weekly to a story the Macalope had heard before. Back in the 1960s, designers of the lunar lander were having terrible trouble getting the thing to pencil out within the constraints they had. The astronauts needed a clear field of view, but a sitting astronaut requires a large swath of glass in order to gain peripheral vision.
So they took out the seats. Not only did that solve the sight problem, it also solved the weight problem and the problem of mobility within the lander.
Nobody wants to give anything up, but sometimes that’s exactly what you need to do to get something back—something a netbook or a tablet running Windows 7 will never have.
And that is freedom. Freedom to work outside the constraints of everything that came before. If that sounds like Apple-booster double talk for “STEVE JOBS HAS COMMANDED ME TO PROMOTE THE IPAD AT ALL COSTS,” well, sorry. It’s a vision of technology you can either buy into or not. The Macalope’s laid down the (metaphorical) cash, but he recognizes there are those who haven’t. For you people, here’s a mouse you might like.
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