iPad Dismissal

February 5th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk

Fraser Speirs nails it yet again with a blog post titled iPad Fallacy #1: “It’s not for con­tent cre­ation”. In the post he poses the question:

I keep hear­ing this thing on the web that the iPad is “a con­sump­tion device, not a cre­ation device”. I don’t know why peo­ple keep say­ing that. It’s fast enough, it has enough stor­age and it has some seri­ously pow­er­ful appli­ca­tions. If that’s your opin­ion, please enlighten me in the comments.

Fraser con­tin­ues on to com­pletely debunk this fal­lacy by show­ing screen­shots from Apple’s iWork demon­stra­tions dur­ing the intro­duc­tory event. To me though, the really inter­est­ing thing is answer­ing the ques­tion that Fraser poses: “Why do peo­ple keep say­ing that?” I think that, in many cases, the rea­son peo­ple keep mak­ing that claim is actu­ally an off-shoot of the same “Future Shock” that Fraser him­self described before. Or, to pimp my own work, I think that state­ments that the iPad is “just for con­tent con­sump­tion” are fur­ther exam­ples of nerd myopia.

Like most things in the real world, responses to the iPad are not a sim­ple binary “love it” or “hate it” propo­si­tion. In between the peo­ple who dis­miss the iPad as a “big iPod Touch” and those of us who see it as a poten­tial rev­o­lu­tion in con­sumer com­put­ing there is a mid­dle ground of peo­ple who almost see the poten­tial of the iPad, but still feel the need to dis­miss it in some way. The two most com­mon forms in which I’ve seen that sen­ti­ment expressed can be summed up as:

“The iPad will be the per­fect device for media consumption.”

and

“The iPad will be the per­fect device for my parents/children/retards/any group per­ceived as less ‘savvy’ than the per­son mak­ing the statement.”

The thing is, both state­ments are per­fectly accu­rate, but by lim­it­ing the iPad’s poten­tial to just being a “dumbed down” com­puter, they miss the point. It’s obvi­ous that Apple intends the iPad to be the first in a new class of com­put­ing devices. Looking at the iPad and dis­miss­ing it as just a toy for cer­tain less savvy users is as short-sighted as the peo­ple who dis­missed the orig­i­nal Macintosh as a toy for graphic design­ers. Of  course, see­ing as I still hear peo­ple mak­ing that claim, 26 years later, I don’t hold out any hope that the iPad dis­mis­sers will stop any time soon.

8 comments - (Comments closed)
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  • Anonymous

    /nitpick In the last para­graph above, it should be “I still hear”. /nitpick off

    I truly believe the iPad rep­re­sents an inflec­tion point, much as the orig­i­nal Mac did, and that the future of computing/communicating “for the rest of us” (and I include most geeks/nerds in that ‘us’) lies much more along the path of the iPad than per­sonal com­put­ers (as they have been defined to date).

    • http://www.theangrydrunk.com The Angry Drunk

      Thanks for the heads up on the typo. Writing when you’re as hung-over as I am is always an adventure.

  • unclerand

    I enjoyed this arti­cle Angry B. Rather than reit­er­ate what many oth­ers have writ­ten before, I found a link (dated in that it lacks any­thing directly deal­ing with smart phones [iPhones] or “smart mp3 play­ers” [iPod Touch]) which you and oth­ers may enjoy.

    Wax nos­tal­gic and think how this might relate to the iPad and what it does:

    http://​www​.willy​hoops​.com/​m​i​c​r​o​s​o​f​t​_​v​s​_​a​p​p​l​e​_​h​i​s​t​o​r​y​.​htm

  • http://twitter.com/ChurchHTucker ChurchHatesTucker

    Even cre­ators are con­sumers some times. The first thing reporters do in the morn­ing is read the papers. Filmmakers see all the lat­est movies. Etc.

    Sure, this is great for my Dad, et. al, but this is also a supe­rior device for loung­ing in bed with on a Sunday, a quick trip to the cof­fee shop, The GF on her train com­mute, etc.

    My only con­cern: sync­ing b/t my MacBook, iPhone, and this bad boy. That’s where it’ll get ugly.

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    I just don’t see the point of point­ing out lim­i­ta­tions of a prod­uct, which, just like the iPhone before, will be defined by soft­ware. The soft­ware will define how use­ful and pow­er­ful the device will be for cer­tain groups of cus­tomers. [exaggeration]The iPads capa­bil­i­ties are lim­it­less, because imag­i­na­tion is lim­it­less and the hard­ware is secondary[/exaggeration]

    Last week Mr. Cohen said on Twitter that he’d love to have an actual text edi­tor on the iPad. It took me a moment get why: wow, I’d love to have some­thing sim­i­lar to Espresso on the iPad, where I can code/learn html5.

    The iPad will not be for every­body — obvi­ously — and I can think of many sit­u­a­tions where it might not be per­fect for my day to day work. On the other hand, maybe if I rethought the way I do cer­tain things it might sim­plify and improve my workflow.

    Example: Do I need a full fledged MS Word when I’m on the go, or will basic basic for­mat­ting be suf­fi­cient? I could con­cen­trate on what I need to write and do the fin­ish­ing touches and lay­out later, on a big screen.

  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    [I thought I’d repost my com­ment on this.
    If you are able to restore the orig­i­nal com­ments, please delete this one.]

    I just don’t see the point of point­ing out lim­i­ta­tions of a prod­uct, which, just like the iPhone before, will be defined by soft­ware.
    The soft­ware will define how use­ful and pow­er­ful the device will be for cer­tain groups of cus­tomers.
    [exaggeration]The iPads capa­bil­i­ties are lim­it­less, because imag­i­na­tion is lim­it­less and the hard­ware is secondary[/exaggeration]

    Last week Mr. Cohen said on Twitter that he’d love to have an actual text edi­tor on the iPad.
    It took me a moment get why: wow, I’d love to have some­thing sim­i­lar to Espresso on the iPad, where I can code/learn html5.

    The iPad will not be for every­body — obvi­ously — and I can think of many sit­u­a­tions where it might not be per­fect for my day to day work. On the other hand, maybe if I rethought the way I do cer­tain things it might sim­plify and improve my work­flow.

    Example: Do I really need MS Word when I’m on the go, or will basic basic for­mat­ting be suf­fi­cient? I could con­cen­trate on what I need to write and do the fin­ish­ing touches and lay­out later, on a big screen.