February 5th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk Add Mike Monteiro to the list of people who actually understand the iPad. The money quote: The people don’t want “tablet computers” with Ubuntu and OpenID (worst name ever for a product attempting broad acceptance). They could honestly give a shit whether it’s a closed or open system. And, let’s be really honest, they probably care as much about DRM as they do about baseball players juicing; by which I mean not very much at all. They want things to work most of the time, and be easy to fix when they don’t. And if the process by which it happens is “magic” they are totally cool with that. They want the thing in the movies. This is a concept that’s been banging around in my head for a while now. Ask most geeks if, given the opportunity, they would want a device like the PADD from Star Trek. Hell, ask them if they would want the whole Star Trek computing experience (“Computer, download all available pornography with the keywords, ‘asian,’ ‘big titties’ and ‘lesbian’”). I think most would say yes. But, when confronted with what well may be the genesis of that model, they run
Continue reading Mike Monteiro Fucking Gets It
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
Continue reading iPad Dismissal
February 1st, 2010, by The Angry Drunk As anyone reading this blog is almost certainly aware, Apple announced the long-awaited iPad last week; and the tech world collectively lost their fucking minds. As I’ve already opined, I think that Fraser Speirs has written the best analysis of the collective pants-shitting and I would highly recommend reading Fraser’s article if you haven’t already. Flying somewhat under the radar during all this babble was another phenomenon which I think provides an interesting parallel to some of the ideas that Fraser articulates so well. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed references to something called “Letters.app.” For those unaware, here is some background. Earlier this month developer Brent Simmons put out a call-to-arms for the development of a new email client to fit the needs of “developers and power-users.” The argument being that all extant instances of email clients (specifically for the Mac OS, but presumably for all platforms) are lacking in some way that makes them unsuitable for “developers and power-users.” The goal of the project, soon dubbed Letters.app was to harness the skills and creativity of the indie Mac development community to build the perfect beast. Shortly afterwards, the project completely and very publicly
Continue reading iPad, Letters.app and Nerd Myopia
January 31st, 2010, by The Angry Drunk I’m going to jump in on the bandwagon and heap praise on Fraser Speirs’ brilliant analysis of the iPad and the tech world’s reaction to it. I pretty much am in complete agreement, and I wish I had written this.
January 29th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk Inevitably, amongst the rest of the inane wailing about the iPad in the last 48 hours, the old “closed system” meme has reared its tired head. The particular form of that meme that I want to focus on is a particularly annoying variant and one that is best expressed by Alex Payne in his blog post On the iPad. In yonder post Alex makes the assertion: The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.
Perhaps, but let me counter with a bit of my own history. My first computer
Continue reading iPads, “Hackers” and the Death of Computing
January 28th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk Courtesy of Penn Jillette, my response to 95% of the iPad “analysis” out there: Thanks to my pal Peter Cohen for thinking of this first
January 28th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk Yes, the fucking iPad is finally here. Now, at least, the craptastic blog posts and articles can have some basis in reality…or not, this is the blogosphere we’re talking about here. As we all know, the question burning up the intar-tubes is, what does Darby think of this thing. Well, dear readers fear not, for all shall be revealed. Read on to learn the truth. Continue reading iPad Calculus
January 27th, 2010, by The Angry Drunk
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