*heh* (“Sexist!”)
eWeek has a lil slideshow of 10 dirty lil “secrets” Steve Jobs glossed over about the iPad. They’re not secrets, of course, since anyone can discover them, but these are lacks deliberately downplayed by Apple and the Apple Fanboiz Macultists. Here’s my interpretation of the slideshow.
No flash. Means, you’ll not be watching Hulu from the iPad, among tons and tons of other sites that;ll be crippled or just flat unavailable.
No multitasking. That means cutting and pasting between an email and a word processing document… won’t happen. And that’s just one of hundreds (at least) of normal things folks expect from their computers that simply won’t happen with the iPad.
No video output. Want to share viewing of a video from an iPad? Well, gather ’round the teensy lil screen then. Good luck with the jostling and head-knocking.
And speaking of viewing videos, where’s an optical drive or even the ability to attach one? Oh, sure, there’s the proprietary, highly weird Apple-specific port that can connect to USB devices–IF they are Apple-specific (Or perhaps even iPad-specific!). Limited much?
Print? You don’t need no steenkeeng printing.
The price stinks. For LESS than the price of the cheapest iPad, one can buy a multi-touch tablet netbook with tons and tons more features–including an SSD that’s twice the size. iPad? Over-priced by Apple, as usual.
The display is NOT optimized for reading, so touting it as a Kindle killer is stupid. I read eBooks on my computer and can get away with it because I do it on a beautiful, rock solid 23″ display driven by over a gigabyte of video memory on a very nice vidcard, and still a couple of hours reading requires a break. E-ink for reading books on such a small device, Apple.
If you want USB–for a very limited range of peripherals–buy an extra piece of equipment, a dock, to allow using them. Whereas, a multi-touch tablet netbook will allow using any of literally thousands of USB devices, right out of the box, no “dock” required. Apple’s take is apparently that no one would really want to attach other devices to their crippled piece of sucker bait.
Oh. Wow. (Not) Every app in the Apple “App Store” will supposedly work on the iPad. Of course, until they are re-written, they’ll all display at iPhone size. Single tasking on a 9.7″ display with most of the display unused. Sweet, Apple! Stick it to the suckers one more time!
Last slide: iPad is just a bloated iPod Touch. Nothing anywhere near as “revolutionary” as Jobs’ propaganda would have it. It’s not even competitive in either features or price to the cheapo netbook multi-touch tablet PC I linked above.
Now, here’s the significant part of this post that’s otherwise just a cribbing from someone else’s slideshow. Why have I ragged on the iPad so much since its debut? Simple. I view the iPad as symptomatic of one of the great weaknesses of our society: people will buy it because they
a. find sizzle more appealing than steak
b. are too self-enstupiated to actually spend their money wisely
c. easily misled by fast-talking con men… because they either want to be or are simply too lazy to even bother to turn their brain on.
It really does come down to that, and it pisses me off, because, in a representative republic such as ours, especially one that has tended ever further and further toward that evil, democracy, that the Founders wished to avoid, a well-informed electorate that can separate the wheat from the chaff, make wise decisions based on well-researched information and choose representatives based on sound reasoning is essential.
And the success in the marketplace of phenomena like the iPad indicate that we do not have a population of voters able to do those things.
And yeh, I added the parenthetical “Sexist!” aside at the head of this post precisely because the linked cartoon illustrates my point about the self-enstupiated masses.