What follows is a confession, I guess. An explanation. A justification, maybe.
Before you read it, you should know that I have owned a million hand-held computing devices and openly admit to how useless most of them have been.
Palm pilots, handspring visors, calculators "that can do graphs". Extensive exposure to Quantum Leap has made me believe that the most awesome thing humans could possibly come up with is a hand-held, portable device that can tell you anything there is to know about a given subject, provide you with unexpected information, allow you to recall previously understood information for verification and demonstrative purposes and tell you where's best to hit the balls in a game of pool.
It is with all that in mind that I have been tricked into buying almost every generation of handheld computing devices. These things have stored my half-baked to-do lists and an incomplete collection of non-transferrable, hand-keyed address-book information in a completely useless way literally for decades, each generation one tantalising step closer to Ziggy than the last.
When I got an iPhone 3G in 2008, I relaxed. They didn't need to make it any better. I could read wikipedia, hold all my accurate address/contact/to-do shit and quietly sync it with web services for future/remote/replacement/upgrade use.
Then, in about April 2010 they released something to make it even better... and by "better" I mean horribly slow and miserable... iOS4. It was like Ziggy had developed a kind of autistic pedantry, making his own interpretations about what I had meant by that swipe or this tap, based loosely on what had been on his screen two seconds ago.
"Why are we here, Al?"
"I don't know, Sam, I'll ask Ziggy"
*swipe* *tap* *tap*
"Ziggy says I just put him in Airplane Mode"
In August 2010, I found myself killing a few hours in Liverpool with my 3G iPhone, which was running like a child with polio. Something inevitable was about to happen.
An Apple Store full of scousers is an interesting thing.
The technology has escaped the understanding of Apple Store staff in the best of towns, (try asking if <product X> can perform <function Y> and their response is a now-standard electrical goods store affirmative-with-get-out-clause "It should do!" or "If it doesn't already, I'm sure an update will...") but in Liverpool the scally twang makes their tenuous grip on the facts feel like a cunning diversion while their mates nick the hubcaps off my Powerbook G4.
Despite the fuckwitted staff, the ridiculous all-glass building design, the ocean of hipsters furiously facebooking their supercool location, the indulgent packaging, the torrents of shit I was going to get from friends who were fanatically (and irrationally) anti-Apple, I walked out of this big Fox's Glacier Mint of a shop (sorry, "store") with an iPhone 4 and an iPad (unexpected).
Even though every single one of my questions about both devices was answered unsatisfactorily by the Boswell Geniuses.
So, any regrets?
Yes. Not buying a case that could adequately disguise the iPad.
It's portable, you see. And light. And has brilliant battery life. And has Wi-Fi. So it's theoretically great for use in public eating and drinking environments! You'd think. It would be... if it wasn't for other people. People who seem to see it as a flag saying "come and talk to me, I'm not busy and I love chatting about my hardware".
In this cafe (http://www.juicafe.co.uk/) I asked for:
"a crispy bacon sandwich and a cup of tea, please."
A few short minutes later if became tragically apparent that the over-chummy-but-convincingly-human smoothie-robot had a program specifically for replacing the expression...
"crispy"
with
"loud conversation about my iPad, a barely-cooked"
...before processing the request.
He proceeded to ask, (I shit you not)...
"is that one of them iPad jobbies?"
"yes."
"Is it as overhyped and useless as people say?"
"Well, I like it."
"I see. Well, it's not on my shopping list, anyway."
This is a tragically all-too-familiar tale. Most iPhone/iPod touch/iPad owners I know actively hide or disguise their devices. The accusation that we have these things as cool conversation pieces is like to saying the same thing to Simon Weston about his face.
So, to get this straight... I find the shops ridiculous, the staff are shit, I hate the crowd I belong to by owning these things, I'm indifferent to the idea as device-as-accessory and I hate being approached by strangers to talk about one of my fucking devices.
All the Apple-critics I know, bar none, cite the above reasons as the *only* reasons people would buy Apple products, especially the iPad.
So, to the point. What follows may seem inconceivable.
I, David Wright, for quiet personal use, genuinely find the Apple iPad to be the most convenient, intuitive and adaptable multi-purpose computing device I have ever used.
That is my final word on the matter.
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