Man I don't give a shit.
heh heh. someone's old and grouchy.
My take on the ipad, as well as the iphone, and Macintosh computers for that matter (ibook, imac, cube, etc) is this:
these computers are compromises. There are major major compromises wired into these computers. Same with any PC running windows.. windows is a compromise as well, and arguably windows is the worst compromise of all. I know that maybe people don't see it that way, or even if they do, they can't afford to not use windows, in the same way that many people get payday loans.
Poverty is a trap. Poverty has less to do with what you can and can't afford, and everything to do with what you perceive that you can and can't afford, and what you perceive that you *need.* Windows is for many people the payday loan of technology. It'll let you bridge that gap in the short term, but in the long term you'll pay.
Don't get me wrong, payday loans can serve a legitimate function... if your bank is in the final stage of repossessing your house, and if you don't get them that payment by closing time on Friday, and you're $200 short, a payday loan would be cheaper than losing the house. But how many people actually use payday loans in that way? And even so, you still take a hit.
Ideally we would all have Macintosh computers and iphones and ipads, and we would all drive tricked out cars that are safe and well balanced and reliable, and we'd take our cars to the mechanic on the rare occasion that they do break because our time is better sent doing anything than fixing cars.
The reality is that we can't all afford these luxuries, so we wind up working on our own cars, and eventually learning how to run linux and use Open Office instead of Microsoft Word and Powerpoint and Excel and so on.
And then there are those who live in crappy apartment complexes and work 50 60 even 70 hours a week for low wages and who drive $30,000 cars with spinners and tricked out suspensions and park outside on the street and yes these people run Windows and these people pay the mechanic to fix the car and they pay the Best Buy kid to run spybot for them and/or reinstall Windows for them.
Unfortunately, Apple hasn't really done anything fundamentally original or good since Steve Jobs came back. All Apple did was buy NeXT, and adopt as it's own NeXT's business strategy of monetizing Linux by leveraging Linux/Un*x to fill the need that Microsoft created and then that the cell phone makers created and now that the ebook reader makers have created.
So Apple has a room full of moneys that they use for product testing, to make sure that the touch and feel is okay, and that the buttons are in the right place and that on average (not entirely, only on average) the GUI is a few notches better than the competition. Apple pays a little extra to get slightly better test monkeys, but most importantly of all, Apple is structured internally such that the directives of the head money (we'll call him 'Steve') get listened to by the other monkeys. Apple may well be able to carry on like this when the lease is up on Steve, because it's not so much Steve's ideas that are what allows Apple to make better products, but the fact that the Apple monkeys obey Steve... Once Steve leaves, someone else will be able to step in and fill Steve's shoes, demanding that the GUI make some sort of sense (oh, the brilliance of it! My dog could never have suggested that!) and continuing the beat the same old dead hoss of a business model, namely, building that semi-ok GUI in Linux.
Meanwhile, Linux keeps getting better and better... Apple's business model can only work for so long. I'm not saying that Apple will be displaced directly by Linux. It may well be some third party company (like say Sun) (who bought them/merged them again?) decides to break Apple's toy by pushing for open standards. I don't think that there are many if any companies that can do what Apple does, which is to make products that suck less than everyone else... by definition there can sort of only be one such company at a time... but what these companies can do is encourage open source development of products that don't suck... which is certainly tricky, I mean you look at some of the idiocy of Firefox's GUI and you see what I mean, but, over the long haul, the open source moneys can probably do more and better work than the Apple monkeys.
$.02.
if this made sense to anyone reading it, seek medical attention now.
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