Congratulations, Apple. Your hype machine works. I'd forgotten how effective this thing was, but, what with the revealing of the iPad and the subsequent "I want this" lowing of the peanut-gallery generation (read: anybody who has a keyboard and who has ever used an iphone), you've shown the world that yet again your ability to unleash a half-baked, first generation product upon the masses is unsurpassed in the world of hyped up Edsels (read: Silicon Valley. Also, I'm talking to you, Google and Nexus One).
I should be fair here. Apple has unleashed a slick, well-constructed device. It's polished. It does everything you might ask of it, and I'm sure, given Apple's multimedia-friendly outlook, it will do all of them beautifully. And Apple has always been good with the business model aspect of things: starting with the iTunes store, they established a model that worked beautifully for the music world, then tvs, and now are hoping it will apply to books. And it looks like, from the early adoption by various publishers, it just might work out. And frankly, I can't cry about having a venue for magazine subscription service on a display that can give it justice.
But, dammit, they whiffed on the OS. I've been staring at this thing, really staring at it, and trying to figure out what type of user experience they were envisioning. I don't know about you, but when I read, I like background music. Esp. magazines. And with the old iPhone OS not being able to multitask, it fails that. Blah blah blah blah, noise machines will want their own devices. But frankly, if it can't accommodate all possible experiences, then it's not quite ready to be hatched.
Okay, I lost my train of thought. Ruminations and otherwise. I think it's time to visit the social security office. Wish me luck.
