There are lots of reasons not to want an iPad. It doesn’t have a camera. It doesn’t have multitasking. It’s “just” a large iPod Touch. I can understand these, although I think the latter argument shows a considerable lack of imagination.
And then there are those who say the iPad is a moral travesty that will destroy computing for ever and ever.
Wait. What?
Alex Payne says he’s “disturbed” by the iPad: “The iPad is an attractive, thoughtfully designed, deeply cynical thing,” He says. “It is a digital consumption machine [...] a device that does little to enable creativity.”
To be fair, he said that at the end of January. Maybe he’s walked it back since then. I’ve been busy the last month and a half working on and demonstrating an iPhone application to a bunch of small, independent, non-technical folks left behind by both the open-source and commercial computing revolutions.
I tell them about what we’re doing and I can see the wheels in their own heads start to spin. The other end of “consumption” is “creation” after all, and anything that makes it easier for independent and small-operator creators to get their creations to market is ultimately something that encourages creativity.
The iPhone OS may be closed, but it does provide a significant channel for independent developers, writers, performers, and artists to get their work in front of people and maybe even make a living doing it. And while Apple does control access, their interference is significantly less than that of traditional publishers, and is more than offset by the fact that they’re giving creative people a means to get around the traditional bottlenecks to reach a large and growing audience.
The concern of computer geeks like Alex seems to be that closed platforms like the iPad will eliminate traditional computing altogether, leaving professionals, enthusiasts, and interested children without the opportunity to take apart, study, and program computers. That concern is not just pessimistic, it’s apocalyptic.
And I can’t even imagine how it can come to pass. For something to be a compelling enough “consumption device” for people to purchase and use on a daily basis, it has to provide access to things to consume, which (as I’ve said) presupposes a significant number of people creating those things. Creative people are interested in their tools, and if you limit them too much or in the wrong way they move to other platforms. They want and need devices that are far more open—MacBooks and Linux netbooks and the like.
People like us are so numerous and voracious that we can keep that market open. We arguably created it in the first place. And considering how inexpensive computers are now and how much free software open computing has provided already, it’s going to be very difficult for a company like Apple to shut down and control all computing development even if they wanted to, and I don’t think that they do.
So I don’t really think there’s anything to fear there; record players did not kill off studio recording equipment. iPads are not going to destroy geek computing.