Tomorrow, Apple’s iPad glides into stores, and I’ve been contemplating getting one. Actually, contemplation hasn’t had much to do with it
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I’ve been pawing (and pinching, and caressing, and doing all sorts of multi-touching) extremely pretty images of the thing on my computer screen, lost in full-on drool mode. Hype is powerful like that, and I’ve been hoping for someone to come and multi-smack some sense into me. Is this thing actually worth getting?
The
New York Times
’ David Pogue, the Awl’s Choire Sicha, and BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow have, in separate pieces, put forward an ardor-dispelling case against the iPad.
Pogue
, in the final paragraph of his generally mixed review: “The iPad is not a laptop. It’s not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it.”
Sicha
builds a similar point into a much less charitable argument: The iPad is “useless as anything but a consumption device,” and “actively resist[s] the urges of people to make things.”
And
Doctorow
is still harsher, enlisting an extremely un-pretty image from the sci-fi writer William Gibson: “The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a ‘consumer,’ what William Gibson memorably described as ‘something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth … no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.’ ”
It seems the iPad has become a focal point for some long-festering grumblings about the old, underdog Apple vs. new, architect-glasses, ersatz-creative Apple. Doctorow points out that the old Apple ][+ came packaged with under-the-hood schematics should users want to take apart the watch and play with it. He cites a rallying cry for the curious: “Screws not glue.”
How long before someone creates a remix of Apple’s famous ” 1984 ” ad, in which a woman hurls a sledgehammer through a giant, wall-mounted iPad, freeing the poor, app-opiated drones in its thrall?