The media is awash with the buzz, the lines are snaking all over the world with famished "wanters" and "needers" and like an oracle's tablet the iPad is delivered as if coming down from Mt. Olympus.
Is iPad here to save us? Enlighten us? Amuse us?
Or, is it taking us one big step closer to the event horizon of environmental doom?
In dog years I'd be dead. I'm old enough to remember the terrifying feeling of watching my neatly organized Fortran cards fall off the edge of a table like a deck in Fifty Two Pick-up.
I'm still pretty tech-savvy. I can build, use, program, and break today's newest consumer technology.
So I'm thinking "should I buy Apple's new candy?"
Fuck no. And we have two iPhones, old iPod, and 6,000 legally digitized iTune songs.
It's bad enough Target and Walmart are dead set on getting us to buy more useless plastic garbage, made in China, which is going to find it's way to the Pacific Gyre 2.9 weeks after dumb consumers make their fateful purchase. I hate to be a classicist, but the folk trolling Walmart and Target, filling their baskets with useless Chinese plastic bobbles, are clueless. You can't really get mad at the "clueless."
It is really bad enough one of the most liberal presidents ever just began his new mantra: Drill Baby Drill.
Yet, people gobbling up the iPad, and the pathetic who making them/trying to force feed them to us, are far from clueless. They are fully aware that anyone with a laptop made in the last 4 years already has a machine which does what the iPad does. As Pogue says so well:
The bottom line is that you can get a laptop for much less money — with a full keyboard, DVD drive, U.S.B. jacks, camera-card slot, camera, the works. Besides: If you’ve already got a laptop and a smartphone, who’s going to carry around a third machine?
So who cares if it doesn't multi-task, shoot video or is really good for creating anything. Instead as David Pogue points out in the above link, it isn't good for creating stuff, just for consuming stuff. How nice, let us consume more crap which allows us to consume even more crap.
Don't worry, Apple has a second wave coming. As always they have really made this a partial iPad. In 6 months they will release their second wave with video, multi-tasking, photo, etc. Don't worry my fellow consumer, Apple, like always has V.2 on the shelf and ready to go. Like always, Apple is staggering the releases since they just want to keep the waves coming and a good reason for us to throw V.1 out and buy V.2.
Politics don't matter, abortion rights means little, Dem, Rep, or Teabagger is a useless thought, unemployment is a yawn and all the diaries yelling about HCR will be of no concern when the world becomes so fucking clogged with our shit/pollution/plastic/etc. that we start to die off.
If you look billions of light years in each direction you will find nothing more beautiful, hospitable, and unique as Earth. And here we chatter about Dem, Rep, or Teabagger as we knowingly destroy this gem.
Everything, for the people who are not clueless, should focus on the environment.
So we can argue about the minutia or we can do the only thing which matters - Stop destroying the environment which sustains us. A nice first step would be to stop buying the useless the crap which comes from the environmentalist center of the world, China, and is made by women who sound like they are slaves.
Shame on the Apple's of the world and shame on the consumers.
Oh, Happy Easter