It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT.
Since you cannot click a link without getting someone telling you something about the iPad, iHave iNevitably wound up reading a few of them, and iThink this guest piece at Tech Crunch by iPhone app developer Ethan Nicholas is the closest to my own opinion: the iPad is the final distillation of the personal computer into the iDiot’s dream machine. And I mean that in the nicest possible way, because he is talking about his mother…and my mother…and your mother…and every other person who wants this level of technology to be as simple as turning on the television. And so now the Next Big Thing has reduced the personal computer to a television you hold in your hands and also use for some other entertainments like music and books and those addictive little iPhone games, and they’ve taken away all the scary stuff like video editing, spreadsheets, antivirus programs and Flash.
I talked to my mother on the phone a few nights ago, and she told me that she is considering buying a netbook to replace her aging desktop computer. She asked me for a recommendation on the hardware, which I gladly gave her, but now I’m thinking SHE should get an iPad, too, for the same reason: even a netbook is more computer than she really needs. For example, I spent this weekend watching my wife drive herself mental trying to install iTunes on her Windows netbook. All she wants her netbook to do is to play videos, play music, play simple games, and the netbook still want her to be able to finagle her way through downloads, installations, customizing the software, syncing the iPod and then troubleshooting when it doesn’t work properly. The netbook is not simple enough. If my mother buys a netbook, you-know-who will have to drive up to Maine to set it up for her and continue to provide her technical support as I have done for the last nine or ten years.
I wish I had some sort of data source to support my hunch, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that you could probably replace 60% of the home PCs in the United States with iPads without the owners feeling the slightest bit cramped by the limitations of a closed-source proprietary device that only supports a single task at a time and imposes content restrictions. In fact, I’ll bet that most of those people would PREFER it, because it takes away the intimidating vastness of all the things you can do with a full-fledged computer, but still lets you enjoy the benefits of being able to magically access all the wonderful things the Internet has to offer. It’s no accident that the basic iPad is priced to compete with netbooks, after all. For all the talk about the iPad killing the Kindle, et.al., it’s actually a netbook killer.
If the fanbois would all just shut up for a bit and let the people who are the ACTUAL intended market for the product have a chance to discover that their long-awaited Home Entertainment Device Of The Future has arrived, it might actually turn out to be more transformative than the technobabblers said their fantasy iTablet was going to be.
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