Re: [Nettime-nl] Met de iPad begint een nieuw mediatijdperk

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

(sorry voor het engels /geert)

http://al3x.net/2010/01/28/ipad.html

Alex Payne: On the iPad
For years, me and thousands of other techies have been wondering what  
comes after the Personal Computer as we’ve known it. Yesterday, in  
Apple’s iPad, we caught a glimpse. If I had to pick one predominant  
emotion in reaction, it would be “disturbed”.

The iPad is an attractive, thoughtfully designed, deeply cynical  
thing. It is a digital consumption machine. As Tim Bray and Peter Kirn  
have pointed out, it’s a device that does little to enable creativity.  
As just one component of several in a person’s digital life, perhaps  
that’s acceptable. It seems clear, though, that the ambitions for the  
iPad are far greater than being a full-color Kindle.

The tragedy of the iPad is that it truly seems to offer a better model  
of computing for many people – perhaps the majority of people. Gone  
are the confusing concepts and metaphors of the last thirty years of  
computing. Gone is the ability to endlessly tweak and twiddle towards  
no particular gain. The iPad is simple, straightforward, maintenance- 
free; everything that’s been proven with the success of the iPhone,  
but more so.

From iPhone to iPad
The iPhone can, to some extent, be forgiven its closed nature. The  
mobile industry has not historically been comfortable with openness,  
and Apple didn’t rock that boat when it released the iPhone. The  
iPhone was no more or less open than devices that preceded it, devices  
like those from Danger that required jumping similar bureaucratic  
hurdles to develop for.

That the iPad is a closed system is harder to forgive. One of the  
foremost complaints about the iPhone has been Apple’s iron fist when  
it comes to applications and the development direction of the  
platform. The iPad demonstrates that if Apple is listening to these  
complaints, they simply don’t care. This is why I say that the iPad is  
a cynical thing: Apple can’t – or won’t – conceive of a future for  
personal computing that is both elegant and open, usable and free.

The iPad was pitched by Steve Jobs yesterday as a response to  
netbooks. It is not a mobile device, per se. Rather, the iPad is  
competing with full-fledged (if small and ugly) computers capable of  
running arbitrary programs and operating systems. Play all the  
category games you want, but the iPad is a personal computer. Apple  
has decided that openness is not a quality that’s necessary in a  
personal computer. That’s disturbing.

Tinkerer’s Sunset
The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an  
iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer  
today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid,  
potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or  
write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the  
Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours  
without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional  
eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but  
in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture  
that has propelled the digital economy.

Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the “hacker era” of digital  
history. Now that consumers and traditional media understand the  
digital world, maybe there’s proportionally less need for freewheeling  
technological experimentation and platforms that allow for the same.  
Maybe the hypothetical mom doesn’t need a real computer. As long as  
real computers stick around for people who do need them, maybe there’s  
no harm in that.

Wherever we stand in digital history, the iPad leaves me with the  
feeling that Apple’s interests and values going forward are deeply  
divergent from my own. There’s nothing wrong with that; people make  
consumer decisions every day based on their values. If I don’t like  
the product that the iPad turns out to be once released, I’m free to  
simply not buy it. These things have a way of evolving, and I won’t  
preclude the possibility that Apple eventually addresses concerns  
about the openness of the device.

For now, though, I remain disturbed. The future of personal computing  
that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. It’s not a  
future I want to bring into my home.
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