Is the iPad worth buying?

With the speculation pre-announcement and the journalistic frenzy post-announcement, the latest creation by Apple could be seen as just one big iPadvertisement. Here on DigiLounge, we’ve written14 posts about the iPad already, and I’m sure there’s plenty more to come in the future, but, taken collectively, all of these posts sum up why I’m completely uninterested in buying an iPad – it really feels like the second coming of the CD-ROM “revolution” in which “content” people declared that they were going to remake media by producing expensive (to make and to buy) products. And rather than create an essay-like post, I will list my (and many other commentators’) main criticisms of the iPad…

1. Infantile Hardware

Well, let’s start with the device itself. Obviously there has been a lot of thought in the design, as Matt has shown in our first post introducing the iPad, but there’s also a flagrant derision of the owner.

If you want to grow up to be confident and entrepreneurial, then your parents would encourage you to keep rearranging the world as you see it. But with the iPad, it seems like Apple’s target audience is that same stereotype of the timid technophobe, as appears in a billion renditions of “that’s too complicated for my mum”. The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and then ‘trial and error’ improvement; the way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Honestly, I believe buying an iPad for your children isn’t a way of saying, “the world is your’s to take apart and reassemble”, instead it’s a way of telling the next generation that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

2. Monopolistic control of software channel

Now let’s look at the iStore. For a corporation whose CEO professes a hatred of DRM, Apple sure has made DRM pretty important to their work. Having gotten into business with the two industries that most believe that you shouldn’t be able to modify your hardware, load your own software on it, write software for it, override instructions etc., Apple has defined its business around these principles. It uses DRM to control what can run on your devices, which means that Apple’s customers can’t take their “iContent” with them to competing devices, and Apple developers can’t sell on their own terms.

The iStore lock-in doesn’t make life any better for Apple’s customers or Apple’s developers. We at DigiLounge want to be able to choose whose stuff we buy and whom we trust to evaluate that stuff. We don’t want our universe of apps constrained to the stuff that one company or even person decides to allow for its platform. Personally, I don’t want a single, monopoly channel that controls access to my audience and dictates what is and is not acceptable material for me to create. I’m not a  Republican or Conservative Party voter, but I do believe in a market where competition can take place.

3. Press want a father figure

I think that the press, us at DigiLounge included, has been all over the iPad because Apple puts on a good show, and because journalists are looking for a father figure who’ll promise them that their audience will go back to paying for their stuff. God knows how many times I’ve screamed this in people’s ears and written about it on here, but the reason people have stopped paying for a lot of “content” isn’t just that they can get it for free, though: it’s that they can get lots of competing stuff for free, too. The open platform has allowed for an explosion of new material, some of it rough and some of it slick, most of it targeted more narrowly than the old media ever managed.

Rupert Murdoch can complain and complain all he likes about taking his content out of Google, but who cares? It’s at times like these that I like to imagine how different the media world would be if Rupert Murdoch had just been hugged as a child. Just like the gadget press is full of devices that The Gadget Show crew need (and that no one else cares about), the mainstream press is full of stories that affirm the internal media consensus.

4. Gadgets come and go

If you’re living in the USA and buy the iPad tomorrow, then it will soon be e-waste in a minimum of two years. The real issue isn’t the capabilities of the iPad you unwrap tomorrow, but the technical/social/economic infrastructure that accompanies it. If you want to live in a creative world where anyone with a budding idea can make it, the iPad isn’t for you. If you want to live in a fair business environment where you get to keep the stuff you purchase, the iPad isn’t for you. If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you’re going to succeed is if your audience agrees with you, the iPad isn’t for you.

Stay tuned to DigiLounge for the latest news and updates on the Apple iPad!