Jared Rypka-Hauer, Lead ColdFusion Developer, Minneapolis, MN

The iPad... the most divisive device Apple's released in a long time. If you love it, you LOVE it and if you hate it you hate it, Apple, anyone who likes it, people who think it's got some interesting technical innovations and especially anyone who buys one once it's on the store shelves. The funny thing about it is this: the vast majority of people who hate it are geeks. Shhhhh. Don't tell them we've got them figured out or they'll turn the hate hose on you too.

There's a reason it's funny, though. It's funny cuz the iPad is exactly what it's supposed to be. Exactly what it _needs_ to be. Apple is arguably the most successful consumer electronics company in the history of the industry. That they would invest the level of effort and funding they have into the iPad when they had every reason to believe it would be an utter flop defies logic, especially in the face of such things as iPod, the iPhone, iTunes, Airport Express/Extreme, and AppleTV. And as for competing with the existing solutions, why on earth would Apple want to enter a market that's already saturated with cheap, adequate devices when they could, as they're prone to do, create a whole new market all their very own and dominate that market until someone else catches up?

The fact of the matter is this: The iPad disappointed a bunch of people who are already convinced that they know everything and can't fathom a world that's different than the one they've envisioned on behalf of the rest of us. The people who passionately believe that what the world needs is yet another touch-screen laptop. People who think that what is or has been useful is all that ever could, would or should be useful. The lack of imagination and creative thought amongst geeks will never cease to amaze me. Really, of this anti-iPad pedantry reminds me so much of John Dvorak's comment about another of Apple's products: the Macintosh.

He said: "The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a ‘mouse’. There is no evidence that people want to use these things."

Oh dear god! Right up there with "...unless it can multitask, play Flash and use Verizon it's useless!"

The truth is that the iPad (like the iPod and iPhone) "just works", the AppStore guarantees at least a minimal level of quality (crucial on devices targeted toward Joe Public) and hits a need right between the Kindle (which doesn't do much and doesn't do any of it in color) and a laptop (which is overkill for 99% of the people who have them). But the group that's spending the most time complaining is the exact group that this device is NOT targeted toward. God forbid that someone release a product that doesn't coddle the techno-jocks without at least making life difficult for non-technical users!

So, here's the big secret at the core of this discussion: Geeks are pissed off that someone invented a cool tech gadget that's intended for someone other than geeks. The notion that someone would target the general public with a sleek bit of ultra-high-tech engineering just steams them. This isn't about what's good or bad about the iPad, it's about jealousy, status and trespassing on geek turf. This is about producing something that threatens to break the geek world's stranglehold on the world's technological resources and open the internet up for every single person to benefit without much, if any, difficulty whatsoever.

We geeks seem to forget that the technical elite make up a very, very narrow slice of the world's population and the rest of the world is the target for this device. Well, that and people who groove on carrying a bit of Star Trek around with them in their backpacks. We are also incredibly territorial and selfish. Territorial because geeks can't handle the notion of enabling the masses to benefit from simple yet highly effective high technology. It cuts into our superiority complex, a deep-seated emotional necessity built around on the number of times we've been turned down by hotties and got wedgies from jocks. Selfish because from our perspective the rest of the world doesn't exist... all high tech should be developed for geeks, by geeks, targeted toward the needs of geeks, and if the general public happen to get some benefit from it we damned well better get the chance to make jokes about their ineptitude.

And so here it comes. Our doom. HAH! Hardly. While the rest of the world gets the iPad, we continue to get the rest of the technology to ourselves. The biggest favor we can do ourselves (and everyone else) is get the hell over our big, bad selves, quit making inane and ignorant pronouncements about how we know Apple's business better than Apple, and, at the very least, wait to see what happens when the thing finally comes out. My only prediction is that by 2012, you won't be considered a complete geek unless you have one...

Then again I've been wrong once or twice before. We'll have to just wait and see what happens! ;)

Laterz!

PS - until I get around to upgrading or installing some sort of comment spam prevention, email any comments to jared at web-relevant dot com and I'll paste them in at the end of this entry.