That is true. But if their disinterest in technology contributes to making them more “child-like, afraid of things they don’t understand and unfocussed”, to put it in more appreciative terms, what about that?
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Exactly. Both platforms have evolved because they’ve taken good ideas from the other.
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My son and I have recently built a forge to do some backyard metalsmithing. Along the way we’ve learned some fun basics about making charcoal from scratch, smelting metal from ore and working iron into useful forms. It’s fun for us, but this is basic technology that’s thousands of years old and fundamental to pretty much all modern technologies, yet very few people have taken any interest in learning it for themselves. This has ALWAYS been true, yet society gets by just fine. I would never consider calling an artist, doctor, farmer, writer, etc “childlike” simply because they didn’t express interest in the underpinnings of the specific technology I’m into.
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I thought Akimbo_NOT nailed it (and I"m probably older than Cory):
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Is that so? If you ask people if they would like to be able to simply pop in a new battery when the old one no longer holds capacity, add more RAM when websites become unbearably slow, or a flash drive to copy files, the overwhelming majority would say “yes”
Probably if all other things were equal, then yes, I imagine they would. But these features come at a cost – a literal cost as in things like removable batteries and expandable memory slots cost more money than having things just soldered on, but also costs in terms of making a device larger and thicker. There are devices that make these tradeoffs like some of LG’s devices, but they aren’t all that popular.
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I’m on my third. I had a 3G 1st generation model that I used to coordinate operations for a small convention. After a few years I sold it to someone who was just going to use it as an e-reader and media player, and I got a 1st-gen mini. I held onto that one until late last year when I traded up to a current-gen mini. I personally find the mini form factor ideal for my primary use cases, which include browsing the web, taking notes, writing, doodling, reading e-books, and light-to-moderate web development work. I bought a bluetooth keyboard for my current mini just because at this size, the on-screen keyboard takes up a disproportionate amount of space.
In the 10 years since Cory’s “iPad BAD!” post, the platform has gotten enormously more functional. What was, in 2010, mostly a scaled-up iPhone, has accumulated tons of form factor-specific features that make it more amenable to day-to-day workflows, including multitasking, drag-and-drop, and multi-window UIs. It’s easier than ever to move your work around between apps on an iThing, in large part because Apple has been listening to people and providing more and more APIs in the system to enable these sorts of things to occur while also taking security and privacy into account as much as possible.
iOS/iPad OS is essentially being built, slowly but surely, from the ground up to provide as much “traditional” computing functionality as possible without also letting software run rampant on a user’s system, because computers still have no good way of discerning “good thing the user intended to do” from “bad thing a program with identically permissions is doing without the user’s consent”. Yes, that has negative impacts on being able to do whatever you want with your computer, but it also protects people who don’t understand the intricacies of software permissions from the devastation of software that has been specifically written to cause them harm.
Old-school computing was great for hackers and people who really wanted to get into the weeds, figuring out how everything worked and taking total ownership of their isolated devices. But in an always-on networked environment, that kind of freedom is an absurdly dangerous default, because it requires a lot of education that most people simply do not have to ensure that such a device is perpetually safe against intrusion. I will mourn with the best of folks the loss of tools like Hypercard, but the iPad isn’t what killed it. The iPad it not the cause of people’s technical illiteracy, it’s a symptom at best. It exists to provide a safe and secure platform for people who don’t want to make learning OpSec their side hustle just so they can see a video of their brother at karaoke night. I feel like this is something the “open everything” movement has gotten entirely backwards; you can’t just provide a totally open platform to people and expect them to naturally gravitate to it because it’s “better” for them while also doing nothing to accommodate their everyday needs (here meaning, protection from malicious actors, actually-actionable errors, coherent UIs, and seamless integration with other tools).
Cory also still seems to intentionally ignore the fact that you can run your own code on your own iPad without paying Apple $99/year for a developer license. Yes, it requires a separate computer to write the code on, but the capability is there for those who actually want to take an interest in it. I’d love to see XCode on the iPad, but I get the sense that Apple is still trying to make the concept touch-friendly across the board, and they’re likely also waiting until hardware is at a stage where compile times would be non-laborious; the A-series processors are definitely blazingly fast, but a good portion of that speed is through clever tricks to optimize around high-use-case operations, which code compiling definitely isn’t.
I feel like a lot of this “people enjoy being infantilized by the iPad!” noise boils down to “I don’t understand why most people don’t like computers”. Let’s face it, modern “traditional” computing is obtuse at best. When things go wrong, computers give users very little agency to actually address the problem, and the sheer scope of things a computer is capable of doing means that for most people, sitting them down in front of one is like pointing them at a library without a card catalog and telling them to find the book they’re looking for. It’s information overload. Most people get training on the absolute basics, like how to use the mouse, what the Start menu is for, and how to save a file in Word, because that’s all they generally need to do to get their job done. But computers are so general-purpose that there are entire categories of use cases that exist beyond those boundaries, and your average person has about as much knowledge of them as the map makers who put “here be dragons” in the deep oceans.
To those people, a computer is a tool. One which they expect to perform certain tasks. Nobody expects to have to debug their microwave because it’s inexplicably incompatible with 14 ounce Marie Calendars frozen meals. Nobody expects to have to read the fine print to make sure their blender is compatible with Dole strawberries. They just expect it to work, and I feel like that’s a reasonable expectation for mainstream, mass-market tools. I, a person who is reasonably adept at using a computer, would be utterly lost if turned loose on my car and told to change the oil. Hell, I’m lucky I know which wiper blades I need to buy. That doesn’t make me an idiot, it just means that I have other concerns beyond obsessing over my car, and trusting that there are folks with more knowledge and experience in dealing with it than I have in the event that something inside it goes wrong. Like it or not, computers have entered the mainstream as cars, not blenders.
And here again, I would argue that the iPad is not a cause, but a symptom. In the 10 years since Cory’s original post, the dominant “traditional” computing platform (Windows) has taken many steps backwards in terms of providing a safe, consistent experience for its users. The regular cadence of updates which add, remove, or simply relocate things without doing any work to inform the user about those changes is absurd. Plus, since Microsoft essentially turned their “software enthusiast” customers into the company’s unpaid QA department, the quality and overall stability of those releases has plummeted precipitously. If you want to know why people are afraid of their computer and regularly refuse to install critical software updates, you need look no further than the software hellscape being forcibly pushed out by Redmond every 6 months.
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My issue with Android is that the devices and software seem even more in the disposable category than iPads. I see OS upgrades stopping after 2 years for all kinds of Android devices. I had an iPad 2 that got OS upgrades for 5 years, and worked fine for another 3 years after that until I traded it in for money off my new laptop last year. I don’t really see that kind of longevity on the Android side.
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Not sure about that. You say ‘quote’ here, but it isn’t a quote from Apple is it?
Cory wrote those words.
If I say some stuff and state ‘that’s what <3rd party> thinks about you’ then really I’m saying ‘that’s what I think about you’, as 3rd party hasn’t made the statement and doesn’t even know the statement has been made.
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I hated Apple back when they didn’t sell the Apple ][ in kit form.
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How many people who read books have any special knowledge or interest in paper manufacture, print production and binding?
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You are making an assumption and a generalization that disinterest in something will make people afraid of something.
While there are people who are afraid of elevators, most folks get in an out of them without a second thought.
James Burke refuted the idea that the world is simple enough for everyone to understand and folks can expect to understand everything they use in detail back in the 1970’s with “Connections”. He pointed out (rightly IMHO) that it’s the people unwilling to accept that the pace of society has outstripped one person’s ability to understand all aspects of it, and therefore become afraid of progress, as the real individuals who are “child-like, afraid of things they don’t understand”.
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But that’s how a lot (if not a majority) of people view tinkering with their electronic devices. It’s just not on some people’s priority lists, just like gardening or sewing or woodworking or elaborate cooking might not be not on some people’s lists. Not everyone is interested in budgeting their time the same ways as you or me.
To be fair, I’m not entirely sure you’ve made a case that all there is any correlation or causation with an iPad. Speaking purely anecdotally, I’ve run into enough people who can build a PC from scratch whose cultural knowledge consists primarily of anime memes and diet is mostly chicken tendies and Mountain Dew to assign any correlation between technological knowledge and being infantalized.
You’re probably right, all else being equal. But as others have pointed out, all else isn’t equal, and people’s buying habits tend to demonstrate that it’s not as important as a lot of other considerations.
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Ipads also have a significant market in places where that sort of thing is actively bad (though repairability isn’t). You don’t want people messing around with tablets used for charting and inventory tracking in hospitals. And those features would be pretty useless when it comes to point of sale and payment processing services. The combo of widely available tablets, off the shelf cash drawers etc and services like Square have made it possible to put together your own modern register. Or just buy one at competitive prices from your processor. Instead of leasing a broke ass, outdated windows machine running buggy software for exorbitant prices from a traditional POS company.
Ipads are kinda the go to for those set ups. And while the device itself might not be good for fiddling, the total setup is. Frankly you probably wouldn’t get much out of home brew software aside from less reliability and more expensive merchant accounts on regular credit card machines.
There just doesn’t seem to be much market for that sort of thing in the sorts of non-personal use these things get used for. People don’t even really do it on tablets where you can.
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They’re not wrong, y’know…
And they have a substantial financial benefit in the future which exceeds the investment. So you are right, and wrong.
Refusing to understand the technology that shapes one’s life, choices, and mindset sounds pretty child-like to me. I don’t care much if that’s an artist, doctor, farmer or whatever.
Remember Kant: “Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-imposed immaturity”. That’s what we’re talking about here. Our actions have consequences, whether or not we are aware of them.
I don’t know. It is a weird example, because it does nothing to illustrate the problem with the iPad. A book you buy is your own, you gab give it away and repair it as you like, it will still work in 200 years if you don’t get it wet.
The iPad on the other hand, does not work that way. it I guess you know that. If not, I’ll explain.
How might one who does not understand how things work distinguish between progress and something else that just will fuck up things in a very bad way?
But of course it’s simpler to sell that as progress which lines your pockets to people who can’t be bothered to understand how things work.
Of course we can’t understand everything, but we can understand the things that matter. The art lies in figuring out what matters to our collective future, and what doesn’t.
The more apt analogy would be people learning to write and communicate on their own rather than be forced to find a published commercial product available to buy which conveys what they want to communicate
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Nice video. He makes - probably without being aware of it - a convincing argument against making technology more complex than necessary. The iPad just did that: make things more complex. And on the outside it looks like it made things simpler.
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It probably made the Apple II cheaper.
They’d have to figure the assembly sequence, and write a manual that anyone could follow. Then deal with those who couldn’t follow, and needed handholding or factory finish or factory repair of misassembled kits.
They sold an assembled unit that was more tempting to a much wider segment of the population.
