A rant about iPads

I've got a friend who's Macbook pro recently died without warning.
Apple were willing to replace the dead motherboard for about £419. A fair bit, for a 4/5 year-old machine.
Also recently, the same friend acquired an iPad 2 for the price of £500.
He says he's looking for a new Apple laptop to replace his old one, 'To do university work on'.
So, I thought: he just forked out for an iPad 2 - Isn't there an app for that, or something?
I'm serious - you buy a computer, but it can't do quite everything that a normal machine can do, so you have to buy one of those, to make up for the deficits of the first one.

If he can't write and compile code and write reports on his iPad 2, what the hell is the point of the unit?

Steve Jobs cites the iPad as a 'missing link'-device, 'bridging the gap between netbooks and smartphones.'
Some iPad proponents accept these deficits, and attempt to justify them with claims fitting the form of: 'But it's not a computer, it's an appliance - it's not meant for serious computer users, it's meant for people who want to do light tasks'.
(For such a discussion, read: http://www.geeksix.com/2010/01/the-really-big-point-that-ipad-haters-are-missing/)

I'm going to summarise the point made by that page in my own language:
"The iPad can't do things, not because it's a 'weaker'-type of computer, but because it's not a computer at all, and as such, it's not supposed to do these things. Also, anyone who still doesn't understand is a stupid-face who is unable to grasp subtlety and good design!".


What Apple have in fact done, is take a successful product(The tablet pc, a dubious device for a normal user anyway), remove features that most people don't use, and market it as a separate 'kind' of device.

But the iPad isn't even that good. It omits features that normal people(even novices) DO want, such as an SD card slot, a keyboard and a USB port. I know that these things are available as addons, but the dongles look bad, and when attached, remove some of the device's actual selling points(Nice shape, pretty finish, and self-contained appearance).

It also seems to actually require the presence of a 'full' computer, running Apple's iTunes application to update iOS.




The argument that the iPad is 'not a computer in the normal sense', presented in the article on http://www.geeksix.com doesn't hold water, because:

• The purported use of the iPad is exactly the same as the use of a normal desktop/laptop computer most of the time, for many users. We know this is true anyway, or there would be a real lack of user-base.
• Addons exist which allow the iPad to duplicate much of the functionality of modern PCs, such as an SD card adaptor, USB adaptor, and addon keyboard.
• There is an online repository of free and paid applications available for the iPad. In it's stock state, the iPad is perfectly capable of 'normal-person-tasks', such as playing music, social networking, web surfing, email checking. In fact, i'm surprised apple even have an app store, considering how much it detracts from being different from laptops/desktops/netbooks/smartphones.

The iPad is not another class of device. It's mostly a normal computer. It's a hardware/software combination which can carry out tasks.
The iPad is designed to create a synthetic market segment, it's OS is simply another platform, separated and incompatible with others already in place such as OS X and Windows.

Many-an-ignorant-user has presented me with the same argument in fact, for Apple's desktops/laptops - that they aren't meant for 'power users', they're 'just for normal people who don't want to know how computers work'. This is more obviously flawed than the similar iPad argument, I believe, due to the larger, more open ecosystem of applications available for OS X, when contrasted with that of iOS.

In fact, I'll bet that if the device survives, we'll start seeing IDEs and other similar tools which aren't for 'normal people', running on some incarnation of iOS, before long.

I think I've been quite good here, in that I've avoided poking the normal holes in apple products, like 'delicate' or 'overpriced'.
This has been more of an attack on the philosophy/ideals held by Apple and some of it's users.

If you disagree, show me your worst in the comments, I look forward to reading them.

'Til next time :)


ADDENDUM:
If you do feel like swapping £500 for something with a touch screen, may I recommend the Dell Inspiron Duo