This is a kinda continuation of my rant on Friday about MadCatz controller. What I really started this article for to bitch about was the iPad. This isn’t the Apple we’ve always known, but rather the Apple we’ve come to deal with over the past two years.
What really speaks the most about this thing is all the fan-made mockups that were circling the internet OVER a year before the announcement of the tablet. Fanboys put so much thought into the mockups that they came up some cool ideas that the iPad lacked. Remember back in 2000 before the iPod came out? No consumer was sitting around blogging about how they were gonna hold‑out from buying the Rio to wait for a better mp3 player. Nobody was drawing Apple mockups with a scroll wheel that controlled a menu based interface that allowed them to categorize their songs by artist, album, title, or by playlist. Then Apple dropped a bombshell. Sure the following years all Apple did was resize or repackage the same design, but for the most part they were always ahead of the competition by over a year and with the mini, and then the nano, the sheer WOW factor of “holy shit, it’s how small??? And it holds how much???” got them through the show. They hit their first speed bump, and I remember this vividly, when the color screen iPod came out.
Up until that time fanboys were always getting what they wanted. Usually more so. Bloggers would be like “okay, Apple event tomorrow, they’ll probably double the capacity and drop the price by a hundred.” But instead Apple would unveil shit like the mini, with a cool new click wheel. Fanboys would swoon, “oh, wow, oh steve, cool surprise, ZOMG, I just pre‑ordered 12.” But soon people would want more than just music in their pockets. By 2004 the pandemic of viral videos infested every kid in junior high through college senior. Everyone and their moms (no literally, AND their moms) were laughing at those edgy videos on collegehumor and ebaumsworld. Remember ebaumsworld? Bloggers were begging for the iPod with video playback. Then in October of that year Steve took the stage and announced an iPod with a color screen… Wait for it… To look at… photos. Wait. What??? Dude, are you stupid? Does this thing TAKE photos? No??? And it can view pictures, and play music, but not video? What gives, bro? Apple quickly fixed this glaring error and revealed the iPod video a few months later.
Thankfully, that first screw up wasn’t quickly repeated. For a while, Apple went back to making products that some thought were hand delivered from God himself. As video started to become more and more important to the masses, the Apple troll camp divided itself on what features they’d like to see next from the house that Eve’s‑Bitten‑Fruit‑of‑Knowledge‑Built. This is also when I started to get heavily into Gizmodo and I remember OMGponies and kaisermachead gobbling up post space discussing what Apple should do next. One big idea that the trolls came up with was a full screen iPod with the four buttons at the bottom and a scroll wheel on the side like a BlackBerry. That seemed like a pretty good idea actually. The other big idea was an iPod that was also a phone. Maybe you save your call list in iTunes and upload it to the phone, so that way you wouldn’t lose all of your numbers all the time and you’d be able to use the clickwheel to go through your phone menus… Oh texting? Uhhhh, maybe its got like a slide out keypad or something, or maybe you use the clickwheel to scroll through the alphabet like when you win a race on Crusin’ USA at the arcade and you have to use the steering wheel to enter your initials (or you won on your N64 and you had to use the MadKatz stick and you can only scroll one way. That really sucked but thankfully my middle and last initial were the same so I can’t complain too much).
Anyways, you clearly see where I’m going here, the phantom phanboys sorta new what they wanted and kinda had solutions for how to do it, and some even had some nice mockups here and here. In hindsight, those control schemes are laughable (not lol, but like “chuckle chuckle”). While many of them would have worked at the time, they’d also have been outdated within a year. In a surprise turn of events, Apple really out‑did itself and gave everyone everything they ever wanted and things we never knew we wanted in a kick‑ass device that was actually almost as, if not more revolutionary than the iPod itself. (I love that literary technique almost, if not more than hyperbole). Because of a ridiculous starting price, the iPhone sails were slow to fill (see what I did there?) but once they took off, it sold, like, six kazillion units in three years.
[Side note, all that being said, I don't own one because I don't deserve nice things. A short account of what I've done with phones since 2004: I got thrown into a lake with one, I turtled a boat with one, jumped in a pool with one, bought one that I was convinced would not break and was so confident that I threw it against a wall... it broke, I accidentally ran over one in the snow as I backed out of the driveway on my way back to ATO to see if I left it at the frat house the night before, I crushed the screen with a roller coaster lap bar on one, I crushed another screen while rolling down a hill in tight jeans, and most recently I puked into a toilet while one was in my shirt pocket after a night out with Greg Rees (all around debaucherous kinda guy). I just left it there until I moved out of that apartment. Thank god I learned to start saving my contacts in excel].
So in January 2007 Jobs blew our doors off with this iPhone thing and everyone lost their friggin’ minds over how mind‑bottlingly cool this mind‑blowing device was. Except BlackBerry fanboys. They just shrugged and sent BBMs to each other about how gay Apple is. After this point though it was as if the iPhone sapped all of the creative talent from the collective Apple hive mind and simultaneously drained the entire R&D budget for the next three years. Yes the product was way ahead of the times, and yes other phone companies are STILL playing catch-up and yes it took until the fall of ’09 for the Droid to come out and finally give the iPhone some real competition, but why did Apple just all of a sudden give up? Was it like when I had a stellar freshman year in college and after that just decided not to try anymore because the teachers in my department liked me and all I had to do was submit so/so work to get by? Was it because Steve was sick for almost two years? Was everyone at Apple too busy playing wii? Was everyone too busy playing Swedish Unload’em? I ask these questions because I can’t wrap my brain around what happened next.
Soon after the iPhone announcement, and after all the initial excitement died down, people started using it. At first it was awesome, but then people noticed some things they kinda wanted. Like, where was video capture? Actually I know people that went through the menu and thought they were just stupid and didn’t know how to use the camera to capture video. Dear companies, when people just assume you have a feature on your product because it makes logical sense, and then you don’t have that feature, that’s a really bad thing. That means you screwed up and didn’t add something that was common sense. Instead of fixing this issue, Apple then released the iPod touch, with no camera at all. I say this like it was a huge deal at the time and to be perfectly honest it wasn’t. Most people didn’t care at all. It was still a great product and cheap too. And look, it’s fun! Woohoo. But again, looking back at the timeline it’s here that we see the problem starting to unfold.
Over a year after the first iPhone was announced, Apple came back in June to announce it’s first update. And this is when things started to get shitty. Fanboys new what was coming, the iPhone that shoots video and a camera for the iPod touch. This didn’t happen. Sure Apple did deliver upgrades like GPS and 3G, but this was the second time that bloggers had begged for a feature (like when they wanted video playback) that Apple just didn’t pull through with. Sure, the price came WAY down for this bad larry so none of those missing features ended up hurting sales. Both devices sold like hot cakes. Things were going well for the company and anticipation for their new products was extremely high. People could not wait for an iPhone with a front‑facing camera to have video chat. Or maybe an iPod touch with a camera to take pictures and shoot video and immediately upload it to the web at their local wifi hotspot (you know, in the library, or the coffee shop, or outside my neighbors house because he “don’t use no stupid password”, the actual words he said when I helped him set this up. The signal’s really strong outside his garage. One time he went on vacation and I offered to take care of the cats while he was out so I could make sure that he didn’t turn the modem off). I used to wonder if Apple ever read through the blogs, or engadget, or wired magazine, or gizmodo, or the tech page of this small news group called cnn, and if they knew what people were actually looking forward to from their next product. Now I know that they don’t do any market research at all. If they did market research for the iPad they would have known what the masses wanted. Hell, if that had gone online anytime at all and read anything related to gizmos, or gadgets, or tech, you know, the industry that they are in, then they would have known what the masses wanted. They must have just got really, really lucky all these times before. Anyways…
Apple finally delivered the iPhone with video in June of ’09, and even though the front-facing camera didn’t happen, we all forgave them because they dropped the 3G‑regs price down to a mere hondo bucks. Then september rolled around. Everyone knew it was the season for releasing an iPod update, and all of us that were still too cheap to pay for a data plan were pumped to finally get the iPod we really needed. The one that could replace our camcorder, camera, iPod, and all that shit.
Then on September 9th, 2009, the stupidest thing ever happened. Apple did indeed hold a press event and did indeed unveil some “new” iPods. Among these were an iPod touch with, as far as I can tell, no upgrade whatsoever besides memory, and an iPod nano with a camera. Wait. What the fuck? Oh oh oh, but don’t worry because the nano’s camera can’t even take pictures. It only shoots video. So, there’s no camera on the iPod touch… The bigger one… And the nano has a camera but only shoots video? That. Don’t. Make. Any. Sense. At this point even the fanboys were starting to get really pissed off at Apple. But with all of our anger and unanswered prayers we were still willing to forgive Apple when they dropped the tablet.
To be fair, the trolls did put a lot of pressure on Apple. We really treated this thing as the holy grail of gadgetry. Something that would be so amazing it would end all the world’s wars because everyone would be too busy using this device and too happy with it to ever be angry at anything ever again. And looking back, it does seem like a pretty daunting task to make a tablet and make it relevant, useful, current, and cheap. But this is Apple we’re talking about and that’s what they do. So, it really shouldn’t have been a problem, I mean they had three whole years to be working on it. It couldn’t be that hard for these guys, they’re ‘geniuses’. A cool new product should be a piece of cake, especially considering that most of their work had been done for them. Here’s a sample of tablet mockups that were floating around the internet way before the press event this week. Some of these images are a year old, some are even older.
These models were barely ambitious, most of them are just blown up iPods. And while many contributors thought they knew what it would look like, everyone was on the edge of their seats waiting to see how it would be controlled. With all the recent breakthroughs in consumer electronic interactions, from the gimmicky wii and it’s more advanced motion plus, to the ps3 arc and xbox natal on the horizon, gadget companies are coming out with more and more ways to interact with products every month. Some of these are new‑for‑the‑sake‑of‑new, but some of them are intuitive and progressive. Apple has always paved the way with this. From Apple we got the mouse, the first lap top with a scroll wheel, the click wheel, the multi‑touch screen, and recently they’ve had some interesting updates to the laptop mouse pad and the new magic mouse too. (I don’t care about all you people that say “oh well such-and-such a company actually had that idea first”, whether or not Apple invented these, they definitely popularized them. Fuck you windows fanboys that keep calling time machine a rip-off). Input is Apple’s “thing” and everyone just knew that this slate would deliver something new and something that we’d all say “oh cool, why didn’t I think of that?”
Me personally? I was hoping for talk interaction, so I could just say the words “computer, search ‘boobs’” and not have to type at all. Maybe that way I could finally stop getting all my keyboards so sticky (oh, hey, a joke! I made a lot more of these at the beginning of this article because I started it lightheartedly but then I actually got upset. Hey, what’s more fun than swinging a baby on a close line? Stopping it with a shovel! See? Another joke…) Hell, I even thought if Apple was really ambitious they could have a transparent OLED screen on top and an e‑ink screen underneath. That way we could have an awesome web browser and watch videos, but then if we used this thing to read a book it would actually last long enough to finish a chapter. [Note: I read really slowly because I actually say every word out loud in my head. Does that make me stupid?] Well probably, but not as stupid as Steve-O looked (and I mean steve jobs here) when he walked on stage in cupertino this week.
When Steve announced the iPad on Wednesday I was flabbergasted. In a bad way. The only good news was almost completely unrelated to the slate and that was that the VoIP network was opening up. Combined with the non‑contract 3G deal, this could actually be pretty cool… If Apple offered it on an iPod touch… And if the iPod touch had a microphone. Or a camera that doesn’t only shoot video like the nano. Seriously though, this machine is an underwhelming, under‑powered, under‑featured, and over‑sized product. My friend Jay (all around good guy who just has a knack for absolutely nailing analogies) put it really well. He said:
It’s the madkatZ of Apple products. Good enough for a mother to buy and be like “oh this is a perfectly useful gadget!” but anyone who’s actually all about it is like, “meh, this is essentially a bad imitation of something useful.”
Like, Steve, what happened? Didja balls drop off? Where is the next ‘big thing’? [Note: pun not intended at first but recognized while proof‑reading and then intentionally left in because hey, here's the next big thing, it's a big iPod get it?] Where’s the motion sensitive controller? Where’s the hand gesture recognizer that makes this thing work like Tom Cruise in shit-what’s-that-movie-with-the-bald-girl-and-the-future-mind-reading-police… Oh yeah, Minority Report! Where’s the laser sensor that tells how close my face is? Where’s the piezoelectric meter that does…something? Seriously. No, no. Seriously. Seriously, what has R&D been doing for three years? I can’t ask this question with enough emphasis on the word seriously. I seriously want an answer to this question from the big man himself.
iBooks, is cool, kinda. And yeah it’s big enough to read a book on, but nobody reads anymore. Case in point – I’m sure nobody read, or is reading, this entire article… It’s just too long. That’s what happens when you rant. Maybe if it were a video or something… then I’d really be able to spread the message. I just had the best idea ever. I’m gonna go home and jump on iMovie for a while, I’ll send you another update soon.
PS. Swedish unloadem is a ‘game’ where players sit in a circle and cry while masturbating into their faces. The first to ‘go’ loses, and so does the last. Everyone loses when you play unloadem’.
Use it in a sentence: James was so upset about his math exam grade that he went home and played swedish unloadem’ all night.
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