iPad: Happiness via The Have-Nots?
An interesting article has been posted by a Dr. Juan Luis Chulilla Cano, hailing from Spain, about why he doesn’t believe in the iPad and, perhaps more importantly, how the iPad is fueling the mobile technology market down an unattractive path. He says:
“iPad nowadays is very efficient in helping their users to feel themselves different, comparing with the sheer majority of have-nots.”
This renewed my thought down an avenue of the idea of exclusivity. I started to think about how Apple products, since the iPod first started to sag in people’s pockets, have been met with tremendous waves of hype from the media and tech bloggers, and how this has propelled the have/have-not status that has become attached to Apple products. You must admit, the marketing campaigns and publicity measures put forth by Apple really did do a remarkable job. Now we have the iPad, one million units sold in merely a month, and those who have them are busy videoing them in use, or taking them out on the train or bus, and one gets the feeling that their satisfaction with their iPad comes from feeling different, exclusive, outstanding simply because they have one while most people do not.
Their happiness with their product seems to be vicariously derived from the people whose opportunity to own an iPad has been deprived, whether it be by economic circumstances, a personal agenda, or they are simply not interested.
I just wonder how good this kind of direction is. I mean, it’s great for the corporations when they get it right – look at the iPad’s stratospheric sales. But at the same time, what it does is wholly divide an emerging market. Hand-held tablet computers are still in infancy, essentially, and this sense of superiority or specialness derived from exclusivity is really quite revolting and I personally can’t see it helping the growth of the market.
What Apple have done is play off of people’s innate striving for superiority, for one reason or another to look down your nose at your neighbor, whether it be on the train or at the office, and sniff. What Apple are doing is not only cornering, but engineering a new kind of ‘technological-snob’ market. It’s the building of barriers, the drawing of divides. To be honest, I’d never viewed technology as something synonymous with discriminating people but the iPad seems to seal the deal, nail in the coffin on that dying idealism.
Which brings me to my next point about barriers. Dr. Cano says:
“My main concern about the iPad is its tyrannical and obsessive control about what the customer may or may not do with the product they purchased [...] I also find insulting that it is acceptable to treat people as minors with their rights stripped away.”
I think Dr. Cano makes a good point. He talks about the PC revolution and how it has been the freedom of operation. Linux follows this model. Even Windows follows this model, with its unlimited software paradigm that has been, for lack of a better word, essential for the PC revolution. Apple does not follow this model, though. You can’t legally install MacOS on a non-Apple computer.
Dr. Cano continues:
“As it is well known, the only legal software source for the iPad is the AppleStore, and Apple has full powers to decide what is permissible or not. Besides, recently Apple has reduced drastically the programming languages and environments that can be used for iPad development.”
This is where Apple’s approach can hurt the emerging tablet PC market, effectively delaying their dominance as the primary source of internet access. As it stands, those one million plus people who bought an iPad, those many more who own an iPhone, they all gave up their control of their device to Apple, their forfeited ownership in many ways. This is a philosophical argument, sure, but think about it. Your computer is your computer because you can do what you want with it. Install any software you want on it. Apple doesn’t allow you to do that, and when you purchase one of their products, you have forfeited your own control.
This isn’t so bad on phones – it’s fairly common there. But the iPad is a tablet computer – it is an evolution of the PC revolution. The personal computer revolution. One question the iPad begs is whether or not it is a tablet computer you happen to have bought to use, or whether it is your own tablet personal computer.
Apple has undoubtedly taken the forefront charge in the emerging tablet computer market. But their dismissing of the freedom of operation model cannot possibly benefit the market.
Categories: Apple
