just an asterisk

I have been avoiding the subject of the iPad.

It has barely been a week and the hubbub online about the hardware, software, features, design, upgrades, and potential yadda yadda is (almost) enough to make me revert to paper news.  The use of the phrase paradigm shift has hit an all time high… (sigh)

However, a friend asked me when I was going to write about the iPressrelease and casually added “isn’t it about exactly what you preach to your readers?  The ultimate goal isn’t the technology?”

Damn.  Touché.

Moreover, it hurts to admit that there is another layer to the shame – this is just the beginning.  Just an asterisk will probably become a thing of the past.  Sure the new iPad may not be perfect at first.  Heck, the entire line of iPads may not amount to anything (unlikely).  However, what really matters here is that someone has finally admitted that the computer, as we now know and love (hate), may not be for everyone.   In fact, in a statistical sense, it may be for no one.  I mean, how many geeks are there really?  I bet if we took the percentage of geeks in the general population, we’d end up with 0.0.  Why has the computer industry marketed to us for so long???

Think of it in terms of the car.  My father once told me that everyone should rebuild a car engine.  Why didn’t I ever need to learn this?  Maybe it was crap (sorry dad), cooked up by the automotive industry to sell cars, in an age before soccer moms and mini-vans.  I bet you can’t tell me the horsepower of a minivan… The car industry figured it out first – the majority of buyers don’t care.  They just want it simple, reliable and efficient.  Are you going to race in the Indy 500? Drive across the Sahara? Go off-roading in the mountains?

Preeeeeetty unlikely…

Are you going to become a programmer?  Render Pixar’s next movie?  Create computational models?

Again, probably not.

Apple has figured you out and my blog will one day go the way of the dodo…

Awesome.

~ab

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 2:26 pm and is filed under future post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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