Following up on yesterday’s piece, here are my thoughts on five more common criticisms of the iPad.
“Look at that bezel! It’s huge! And un-Apple-like!”
Okay, folks. Just think for a minute on this one. Where would you put your thumbs while you hold this thing if it didn’t have a bezel? You don’t want your thumbs on the touch screen, for sure, since touching the screen is how you interact with the device.
“What kind of a name is ‘iPad’? Are there no women on their naming team?!”
I don’t remember anyone having this sort of reaction to the ThinkPad. Or the CrunchPad. Do you?
“There are no USB ports! I can’t plug in my thumbdrive!”
Say it with me: The iPad is not a computer. It’s not designed to be a computer, nor is it designed to replace any computer you might already have. It’s designed to do a lot of things, but being a standard computer is definitely not one of them.
“It’s just a big iPod touch!”
I’m not going to lie: I love my iPhone. I’m not a big fan of AT&T, but I adore my iPhone. That said, there are a lot of times when I have wished that my iPhone were bigger. Whether I’m using Google Maps, reading an email, surfing the web, or trying to show someone some of my latest photos, my internal desire for a bigger iPhone is quite common.
So, let’s assume that Apple has merely created a bigger iPod touch. How is this a bad thing?
Furthermore, how can you disregard the iPad as simply a big iPod touch, but continue to criticize its price? Its $499/$599/$699 pricing is directly in line with the $199/$299/$399 pricing of the iPod touch.
At the same time, I’ve read a lot of things lately that seem to indicate that the iPad was Plan A, all along, but that the technology just wasn’t there yet. Instead, Apple pared it down into a pocket-size designed and sold it as the iPhone. They used that platform to fine-tune a lot of the technologies (multi-touch, for example) and spent some time working on solving the hardware problem.
If that’s true, then the iPhone and iPod touch are merely smaller versions of the iPad. The difference there is subtle, but I think it’s important.
“It only has a 1 GHz CPU!”
When will we stop defining computers in terms of hardware specifications and start defining them in terms of functionality? I don’t know how big the engine is in my Honda Fit, nor do I know anything specific about its horsepower, turning radius, acceleration curve, or any of a hundred other things.
What I do know is that it comfortably gets me from Point A to Point B with the features I want.
And that’s what matters.
If this device does what you want of it (browse the web, read and write email, view photos, watch movies, etc.), why do the raw hardware specs matter? (Hint: They don’t.)
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