The good, the bad and the iPad coverage

Cory Doctorow, Joel Johnson, you’re both wrong when it comes to the iPad. I’m probably wrong, too. But that’s never stopped me from pointing out errors when I sees ‘em.

First up: C-Doc, I love you and your can-do spirit, but Joel is right. A lot of people want something that just works. The trick is balancing how much to make tweakable and how much to wall off. And the iPad definitely erred on the side of wall off (as Apple is wont to do). But then, if you’re going to try to make a product with a broad appeal, that’s the side to err on. Do-it-yourselfers don’t amount to much when it comes to marketshare. That’s why companies can sell Snuggies.

As for Joel: The old guard isn’t afraid for the reason you think. The old guard doesn’t care that its competitor is bulletproof and doesn’t break down (which it’s a bit too soon to say for the iPad in the first place).

The old guard is pissed because they’d like their own walled garden, where they can reap app store profits and get people to buy a new product once a year. When it comes to Apple’s personal computers and laptops, they last. Hardware updates are incremental enough not to matter much.

What Apple has now, with its iPhone and iPad, is that chrome dream of Detroit – planned obsolescence. Sure, the iWhatnots are expensive. But not so expensive that upgrading once a year or so is out of the question. You buy a MacBook, you keep it for three or four years. An iPhone? Replaced in two or less. I have no reason to think the iPad will be any different.

You can’t increase the storage. You can’t change the battery. What you get on day one is what you get on day 500, except by then the battery you can’t change won’t be working so well.

The old guards of print media may be seeing this as a savior of print journalism, but I doubt their coverage of it has anything to do with their own self-preservation. They like it so much because they like print. That’s the business they’re in. It’s what they do. It’s what they read. They like the layout, they like the graphics, they like the well-written stories that pull from deep wells of resources that many online enterprises don’t have.

And if they’re excited about a new way to keep a lot of that alive, well, why wouldn’t it show up in their coverage? Journalists try to be objective, aye, but it’s always only a best effort, never a true success. I’m a print guy, and the most exciting aspect of the iPad for me is its ability to display newspapers and magazines, and the support it is getting from publishers to do just that.

And when it comes to newspapers and magazines, that’s what readers want – the newspapers and magazines they know and love. Here I show my own bias through my beliefs: This device isn’t made for the web rummagers, the RSS readers. It’s for people who want what they know: Time or The Wall Street Journal or National Geographic. A million people still buy the New York Times every day. Because that’s what they want: The New York Times. They could get 95% of the information in any given edition elsewhere, but they don’t want it from elsewhere.

Sure, you can make your own cola, but you want Coca-Cola, dammit. You want to spend 50 cents and get a can, not spend $2 and an hour to make 4 liters.

And Joel, you’re right. Cory is a consumer. So are you and I. But what you don’t buy as a consumer is just as important as what you do buy. And if you’re opposed to the closed environment and the DRM, don’t buy the product. It’s that simple. Don’t wait for courts to sort it out. It’s not a legal issue. It’s a consumer issue. One that you decide with your wallet.

You even pointed this out once upon a time on Gizmodo, while screaming at all of its writers who blindly followed PR, had to have the latest, ignored practicality, replaced the functional, didn’t bother to hack, embraced DRM … you get the picture. All things you rightfully yelled at the bloggers for.

And all of those are sins that returned to you while writing about the iPad. I cannot get over the hypocrisy between your support of the iPad and the (completely correct) editor I see here in 2007. What happened?