The Apple iPad
The internet right now is a complete shitstorm existing out of 2 major hurricanes. On the one side we have hurricane “Flash vs. HTML5” and on the other side there’s hurricane “The iPad Rocks vs. The iPad Sucks”. I already briefly expressed my opinion on Flash and HTML5 (in short: I couldn’t care less if Flash disappeared from the face of the earth and gave me back my battery life and CPU).
In the discussion whether the new Apple iPad is a thing of genius or should be archived together with the AppleTV, there are 2 major camps, both with an almost equal number of members, spitting out a massive amount of blogposts expressing their opinions, in favor or against the device.
Honestly, I’m sick of reading all these pre-launch opinions about it. I digested about 20 articles on the subject so far, and decided to not even bother reading the other 20 I’ve Instapaperized. But there was one article that jumped out and echoed exactly what I was thinking.
In Future Shock, Fraser Speirs (from Connected Flow fame) hits the nail on the head: We aren’t the iPad’s target audience. The target audience is your parents, your grandparents, people who have no interest in learning how to operate a computer:
[…] they are the people we have claimed to serve for 30 years whilst screwing them over in innumerable ways. There are also many, many more of them than us.
Sure, the iPad is in some areas a bit limited in features, but who needs those features, besides us power users? Fraser continues:
I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.
We have MacBooks, we have iMacs, we have Mac Pro’s. Does this mean we’re not allowed to be seen with an iPad in public because it’s not “advanced” enough? No. Here are a couple of reasons I’m buying one:
- Because it’s Apple hardware, and it’s teh sex.
- Because I want a compact device for when I’m not working. Ever thought about how little we use the keyboard when we’re consuming instead of creating?
- Because I want to design for it, and so should you. In the near future, mobile platforms will become as popular as the web.