Alt Text: Who’s Still Excited About the iPad?
Tons of iPads are currently being assembled in a secret underground Taiwanese bunker accessible only by helipad or telepad, and the general reaction of people on the web is strident, viciously defended indifference.
Nonetheless, there’s no real doubt that Steve Jobs will sell an iPad or 3 million when the tablets become available later this year. The question is, who will be first in line to snap them up? Let’s look at the people who are really excited about the iPad.
Cats
If the hand-warmer app can make its way to the iPad, Apple’s new device may become the new favorite place for cats worldwide to sit, beating out such favorites as “a single piece of paper,” “the remote control” and “your face.” It remains to be seen how much heat the iPad can give off, but if previous Apple notebooks are any indication, sous-vide chefs might also adopt the iPad as mobile cooking stations.
Star Trek cosplayers
The Trek/Apple connection is nothing new. Many people saw an iInfluence on the bridge of the latest Star Trek movie, and this new device looks a lot like the PADDs used in Star Trek: The Next Generation and later series. I was never able to figure out how “boop boop bip” translated into “divert the secondary inertial dampers into the aft shield array, modulate the transporter frequencies according to known Ferengi phase patterns, and slip acid into Picard’s tea,” but now I know: There’s an app for that.
Screen-protector manufacturers
The iPhone screen is resistant to scratches, but not impervious. This creates a market for companies to charge 10 bucks for three pieces of plastic and a wipey-cloth. A larger screen adds half a cent’s worth more plastic, and another $5 to the price for those willing to pay for advanced protection. More cost-conscious folks will just wrap their precious iPads in veggie bags from the supermarket. Inexpensive, and the quick fix probably reduces carbon emissions or something.
Goliaths
These humanoids, introduced in the Dungeons and Dragons supplement Races of Stone, are so large that regular iPhones don’t reach from their rocklike ears to their cavernous mouths. A +2 to Constitution and the ability to re-roll Athletics checks doesn’t help when you can’t call home from the grocery store to find out what kind of frozen chicken nuggets your wife prefers. While Goliaths are eagerly awaiting the iPad, they’re already lobbying Apple to introduce one with full phone capabilities.
Me
Somehow, we’ve become a living-room laptop household, which means that hypothetical questions are instantly entered into Google, any song mentioned is pulled up on YouTube and URLs are mailed at the slightest provocation. Astonishingly, we still get visitors, and my laptop often gets pressed into service for mail-checking and chimp-video display.
My laptop is a professional work machine, however, and contains many important documents and bookmarks, not all of which have “naughty” in the title.
I’ll be in line with the hordes on iPad Day Zero. The weird little device is going to sit on my coffee table with a “Go Ahead and Play With Me” sticker on it, and my MacBook is going back into my work bag, where it belongs. Until someone wants to show me something cool in Flash, I guess.
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Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a goliath, a golem and a Golconda.
See Also:
- Alt Text: Wilderness Survival, iPhone-Style
- Alt Text: Obscure Hobbies for Obsessive Geeks
- Alt Text: Apple’s Appalling Approach to iPhone App Approvals
- Alt Text: A Wistful Geek Heads for Sweet iPhone Hell
- Alt Text: Social Media, Your Constant Friend in Any Crisis
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Brilliant article. I am guessing that my three year old won’t be able to get cracker crumbs under the virtual keyboard of the iPad, which has basically ruined our living room MacBook.
He’s an accomplished iPhoner- he even knows to switch the iPhone to “Airplane” mode when he first starts using it (to avoid spurious calls/emails) so I’d totally trust him with an iPad. Hopefully all the airplane videos he likes on YouTube are H.264 encoded…
I like this article. Lore is awesome.
I’m sure pads are coming, eventually. I don’t think they’ll get serious market share until enough people believe the don’t need laptops anymore. Right now the pad is something that’s between your phone and your laptop and not that many people are going to splurge on something like that right now.
Is there a designated club that makes sure that each apple/ipad article has at least one flame directed at the wired.com staff, and/ or some defensive Apple fanboy? You know, I appreciate the wired articles being free – I read them every day – much more than the news, since the news is filled with horrible things that are happening that we can do little about. The problem with non-Apple products is that they are difficult and not easy to describe, in purpose and “wow factor”. Yes, the rhetoric from Apple is ridiculous about their products being “magical” or “revolutionary”. Let’s face it. Microsoft is the Ford of the 1930s – putting out products at affordable prices for the masses, and Apple is the BMW of the 1990s: BWMs were overrated in quality and bought 1/2 because of status/ image, while 1930s Fords were bought because <> there was a product that the masses could afford, they also worked and were easy to work on and customize. Before Microsoft, you were looking at an extremely expensive computer (possibly made by Apple) or IBM. And Microsoft brought server products such as SQL databases and affordable file server software to the small business/ workgroup. Yes, Microsoft has worn out their welcome, and we are sick of the monopoly of the desktop, but they had a good track record in bringing computing to the masses until about 2000, and gave us a few good standards such as office documents and ajax components. Microsoft is getting better at bringing customers what they want with xbox 360, windows 7, and SQL 2005, all of which are excellent products. Apple revolutionized the user experience with their MacBooks and iPhone. Let’s also applaud Apple for bringing their customized Linux distro to the public and increasing awareness. There are positives and negatives to all these companies, and they ALL must balance between the dreams of their entrepreneurs and inventors, and profitability with the necessary marketing schlock. Personally, I have game consoles and machines equally distributed between Apple, Microsoft, and Linux/Android. Customers are cheating themselves when they don’t objectives pick and choose the best value products based on their own subjective buying priorities.
“Who’s Still Excited About the iPad?”
Never was!
Overpriecd, OVER HYPED! No.. ASTRONOMICALLY OVER HYPED!
Uninnovate products from idiotphone to idiotMac.
If crapple wanted to truly INNOVATE they would COMPETE 1:1 in the OS sphere and RELEASE there OH SO PERFECT OS to the rest of the computing world. Quit fighting clones, EMBRACE them! Sell the OS! Back up your rhetoric that its so much better. PUT YOUR $$$ where your big mouth is!
Just remember crapple fanbois, that with out the following your company would be deader than a horse buggy maker outside Lancaster PA.
XEROX, specifically the PARC! (same for that company to the north!)
BSD – YEP that OH so perfect OS is 95% BSD and X ala Unix & Linux… so much that often you can use ports to install software.
I will credit crapple with pointing me to some new modern music artists from some of the idiotpod ads, and the PC v. MAC commercials I find hilarious… but guess what….
I OWN, ZERO crapple products
WONT BE purchasing any crapple products, now or any time in the future. Price being one starting point, or more precisely NON STARTING POINT.
Who’s Still Excited About the iPad?
Never was, never will be.
Still excited? Never was.
Like most iterations of hardware/software, version 3 will be the best choice. But I won’t wait. I’ve set aside the cash for the low-end wi-fi version, and it will wander around the house for doing all those Google searches. So I’m with you on this one Lore. Still, they should have called it the iMoses, maybe iMo for short. lol
Another Apple ad.
@musesum
Me too.
I only look at Wired these days when I want to see a half page pop up ad, or read about apple products.
Dude, you actually took your books to class? I just took my notebooks. At a university with quality professors, the textbooks are an adjunct to the lecture, not a substitution or a recitation. I mean, maybe for Calc if I had a lazy attack and didn’t do the assigned problems…but otherwise, never. Man was that off-topic! Gotta justify this post somehow….ipad == just_another_grownup_toy. That isn’t a bad thing, it just makes it irrelevant to my life.
lol now the name ipad makes perfect sense if you’re trying to market to trekkies.
Apple should make the iHolocron…now that is something I would buy!
Darn! At the rate Wired is publishing iPad stories I’m gonna be way low on the competition–I guessed a story every other day.
I would be excited for it if it had more freedom… gotta love Apple… let’s get some linux running on it, dual-booting with the current OS. I would def. pick one up if I had that, although you would have to look toward smaller distros due to the low specs… Either way, it boasts the patented lack of freedom Apple is so fond of… Hopefully it is hacked or a competitor makes something similar… Digital clip boards here we go, sci-fi movies are finally becoming a reality… now if we could replace that thick screen with a hologram…
I will buy one. $499 version for apps and mobility while writing.
I live in Taiwan, but sadly will not get an ipad early. I will however place an order with Apple to get my grips on one faster.
I love that ilife lets you write and use documents on this thing. I wonder if I can download my apps for free on this like I did my iphone, because I already paid like $200 for loads of apps on my itouch. I’ll give it a try. HAHA!
Scott C. Waring
Author of George’s Pond, West’s Time Machine, Dragons of Asgard (Feb 2010), UFO Sightings 2006-2009 (Apr. 2010)
I am with bart_hanson on this one. Apple didn’t plan MMS for the iPhone from the beginning? Yeah, right. They didn’t plan 3G? Come on. Push technology? Ditto. And that multitasking thing people keep complaining about (not missing it myself)? Expect it by the 5th-generation iPhone.
Yes, some people will be happy with it and joyously gobble it up as if Apple had invented multitasking. Others will rightly chastise the first group for acting that way, though they will, for the most part, go slightly more overboard than the passengers of the Titanic.
It’s better drama than politics.
I guarantee my cat won’t like this, he is an avid Microsoft fan.
I want it and I’ll tell you why…my smart phone isn’t enough. I want to go back to a dumb phone and use the ipad for all email and surfing. If it doesn’t connect to exchange im out.
We’ll buy at least one. Possibly three or four.
I’m happy with living room MacBook. I see no reason to replace it with an oversized and iPod touch.