Friday I mentioned a reason I’m not getting an i[Tab].* I’ve had some time to think about it and am still not in the market for such things. Instead, I’ll explain who is in the market for such things. The ideal people that will buy an i[Tab]…
… have never learned to type.
Hunt-peck is all you need and all you’d want with a keyboard that’s ergonomically useless. In fact, better they’ve never used a keyboard. They’ll be impressed with the non-responsiveness of it.
… haven’t bought a television in three… err, seven years (let’s be safe).
Any more recent and they’ll have seen widescreen format. Those familiar black bars at the top and bottom will remind them of home no matter where they are.
Aside: Why not make it widescreen in landscape mode? Disable the touch on the sides and dim those portions to black when in portrait mode. Apps could still develop for the fullscreen format but why not cater to those that want a sweet as video player? Disappointed!
… love iTunes.
For as much as you have to use iTunes to maintain any media on the i[Tab], they’ll have to be über fans. Maybe to the point they feed their kids with it.
And finally, they have to be old enough, mature enough or dim enough not to comprehend the glaring double meaning in the under-thought name. I mean, the jokes are endless. (Thus excluding anyone on Twitter.)
Essentially, I’m describing your grandmother. Yes, the i[Tab] is cool and will be popular but only because of the idea of it. In reality it does quite a few things adequately but nothing well.
It’s a cumbersome music player, a poorly designed video player (widescreen!), an unfortunate book reader and an unintuitive (zoom much?) browsing machine. But, it will sell because Apple aims for the market that should exist, not the one that does.
It paves the way for a future of “automatic” computing but that’s not the market I fall into. My parents had the desktop and I have a notebook; maybe this is the next stage of computation but it’ll take a minute for me to jump on board.
* I refuse, at least digitally, to refer to this thing with the absurd, marketing misstep name Apple provides.