{"id":1931,"date":"2010-04-22T13:30:22","date_gmt":"2010-04-22T18:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1931"},"modified":"2010-07-18T16:47:14","modified_gmt":"2010-07-18T21:47:14","slug":"apple-postmodern-consmerism-and-the-ipad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1931","title":{"rendered":"Apple, postmodern consumerism and the iPad"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s not very often that I feel impelled to quote someone else&#8217;s blog post in its entirety, But Ann Althouse <a href=\"http:\/\/althouse.blogspot.com\/2010\/04\/ipad-is-kind-of-like-twitter.html\">says of the iPad<\/a>&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nI have it, and I feel like I could be using it. But I don&#8217;t really use it. Maybe I think I&#8217;m going to be using it. But I also think it&#8217;s possible that I&#8217;m never going to use it. I seem to have a need for it, but I have other things that fit that need that I go back to instead over and over again. And yet there it is, over there. I think I&#8217;m going to be going there, maybe later. Maybe tomorrow.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Amazing. The iPad is the ultimate Steve Jobs device &#8211; so hypnotic that not only do people buy one without knowing what it&#8217;s good for, they keep feeling like they ought to use it even when they have better alternatives for everything it does.  It&#8217;s a triumph of style over substance, cool over utility, form over actual function. The viral YouTube videos of cats and two-years-olds playing with it speak truth in their unsurpassable combination of draw-you-in cuteness with utter pointlessness. It&#8217;s the perfect lust object of postmodern consumerism, irresistibly attractive but empty &#8211; you know you&#8217;ve been played by the marketing and design but you don&#8217;t care because your complicity in the game is part of the point.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>This has to be Steve Jobs&#8217;s last hurrah.  I predict this not because he is aging and deathly ill, but because he can&#8217;t possibly top this. It is the ne plus ultra of where he has been going ever since the Mac in 1984, with his ever-more obsessive focus on the signifiers of product-design attractiveness.  And it&#8217;s going to make Apple a huge crapload of money, no question.<\/p>\n<p>But what comes after this?  After reading Althouse, I&#8217;m getting the feeling that the ultimate may also be terminal.  The way I thought the iPad was going to go was to get disrupted from below by less expensive, less locked-down Android tablets. Now I&#8217;m not sure there&#8217;s enough reality there to sustain the product <em>category<\/em> at all. The entire segment might well turn into as huge a bust as PDAs were in the 1990s.  And that means that over the medium term, two to three years out, Apple is in even more trouble than I thought. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve alluded before to the fact that the two most fanatical and longest-term Mac loyalists among my face-to-face friends are carrying Nexus Ones now, having migrated from Sidekicks but passing up the iPhone.  The fact that Jobs couldn&#8217;t get <em>these<\/em> two people to change cellphone providers to worship at his shrine tells me more about the fading of Apple&#8217;s magic than the hot air and bullshit in a dozen market surveys. Apple has bet its company on the Jobs philosophy, but at the same time I see it losing the adhesive loyalty of the fanbase that&#8217;s been with it since the Mac Classic.<\/p>\n<p>Fast-forward this a couple years and I can see Apple in hell, committed to sexy overpriced products that nobody actually needs, undercut by Android from all directions, and subsisting on a decaying aura of pop-cultural cool.  Because that&#8217;s what tends to happen when you put yourself in the fashion business and you&#8217;re past your peak; those who live by hipness get to die by it too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s not very often that I feel impelled to quote someone else&#8217;s blog post in its entirety, But Ann Althouse says of the iPad&#8230; I have it, and I feel like I could be using it. But I don&#8217;t really use it. Maybe I think I&#8217;m going to be using it. But I also think&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1931\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Apple, postmodern consumerism and the iPad<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1931"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2189,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1931\/revisions\/2189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}