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I’d get an iPad if Apple didn’t make it
Published January 31, 2010
Despite some of my Luddite tendencies, I have a cyberpunk-style fascination with new technologies. While I’m still waiting for the fully immersive, three-dimensional “Matrix” version of the Internet, in the meantime I can become infatuated with the shiny new toys the tech industry is always pumping out.
This is why I own all three major video game consoles — the buggy but prolific Xbox 360, the powerful Playstation 3 which doubles as my Blu-Ray player and the more-than-a-gimmick motion controlled Nintendo Wii — as well as the portable touch-screen handheld Nintendo DS, just in case. It’s why I can’t stop goofing off with friends’ iPhones and iPods. It’s why I have to lock away my credit cards when we go into Best Buy.
On the other hand, I have another problem, besides the lack of sufficient funds to truly underwrite my technical wish list. You see, I hate Apple, which is ironic, as I write this very sentence on a Macintosh desktop computer.
I grew up a PC person, convinced of the superiority of the robust gaming machines my friends and I used over the thin, effete iMacs. I mastered Windows without a thought, but still find the supposedly intuitive Apple operating systems to be designed for an intuitive process other than mine. My distaste for Apple was such, I actually tended to side with Microsoft during its Evil Empire phase.
Of course, with Apple the new king of the tech world, it has inherited the imperial mandates, putting Microsoft in the ironic position of the scrappy underdog. Apple — with its emphasis on costly aesthetics, its locked-down operating systems that discourage innovation, its draconian policies toward potential business partners — has grown smug and self-satisfied and fully confident in its own superiority.
So, despite my tech love, I have managed to avoid owning an iPod or iPhone or any of the other numerous doodads Steve Jobs and company have given us. Apple is the enemy.
Yet that doesn’t mean it doesn’t continue to tempt me. I can avoid an iPod (if not iTunes, which I use on my PC with moral objections that can’t surmount the quality of the program) and I can buy a touch phone from another company.
But the announcement of Apple’s newest shot across the bow, the tablet computer called the iPad, is once again testing my resolve. A middle step between an iPhone and a laptop, the iPad can surf the Web and download applications and play music and read e-books and so much more, all on a device about the size of a sheet of paper.
I don’t need it. I can’t afford it. But, blast it if I don’t want one anyway.
It just looks so cool.
In the long run, the iPad will have imitators. These tablet computers could transform my own profession as newspapers push readers to the Web using devices like this. Their convenience will attract customers, especially as prices go down in the future. They may not be my virtual reality future, but it’s a pretty good next step.
I’d have to have one, if not for that blasted Apple...
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