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The IPad: Beautifully Mediocre

You know that feeling where your heart races in anticipation? It accelerates until it feels like it could run out of your chest. Well, Mac devotees get that feeling every time their fearless leader, Steve Jobs, shows up to give the keynote address, and introduce the new product.

Past announcements have lived up to the hype: OS X, Snow Leopard, the iPod, the iPhone, the MacBook Air. When it was rumored that Mac would be releasing a tablet PC this year, fans of Apple design almost wet themselves in anticipation. They should have kept a closer eye on the cup.

At any rate, what we received for all of our yearning was a 10″ iPod Touch, aka the iPad. Awesome Steve gave us a product that couldn’t quite live up to our imaginations. Supposedly, it will be a fantastic eBook reader/video player/music device. It will also browse the web. That is comforting, except for the fact that it won’t be supporting a major component of the web: Flash. Now, there are many arguments for and against the inclusion of Flash. The biggest problem is, not all the web will work on the iPad, and that is an issue. It doesn’t support the whole web, just the portion that Steve Jobs is willing to put on the iPad.

While the iPad nice and all, I find myself looking for something a little more innovative. I guess if you have a design that works, the next option is to keep increasing the size of the device, until people stop paying for it. iMean, they did that with the iPod, except they just kept making things smaller: Nano, Shuffle…if they could have made anything smaller, they would have. Apple just shrinks or increases the size of the device. It worked for McDonalds. I guess it works for Apple.

The thing is, I didn’t want an in-between product, which is exactly what the iPad is: not quite a computer, not quite a dedicated movie player(no DVD support), not even an eInk based, dedicated book reader like the Kindle. Nope, the iPad is the Labradoodle of electronic devices. It looks kind of neat, but it is just a little of this, tossed in with a little of that. Not a purebred machine, but expensive and interesting looking.

That’s not to say it won’t be a commercial success. I know people who already have theirs picked out…although, at around $1000, I think they might be better off with a laptop. The price is what gets me the most: I could buy 2 netbooks and an iPhone for the price of a single iPad. At some point, it becomes impractical to pay extra, just for the bragging rights. Never in the history of electronics have people payed so much, for so very little in terms of features.

This is the trouble with the iPad: It does stuff that other stuff already does, except you pay more for the privilege. That, my friends, is the gorgeous mediocrity of the iPad.

About the Author

Kurt Hartman is Head of Web Development for OTR Tire Supply in Reno, Nevada. He recently shelled out a reasonable sum of cash to buy his mother an iPod Touch for Mother’s Day. Go ahead and laugh, Steve. His website is http://www.otrtiresupply.com

The Official Apple iPad Tablet Keynote Address Video (January 27, 2010)

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