Not me. I don't particularly want even the already-almost out-of-date iPad that comes out this week.
Even when it comes to cute chunks of technology, most consumers get to the point when enough is enough. Today the Times doesn't just announce the new iPad, it describes the failings of the Kindle, a clever reader that some users now find irritating.
Can you concentrate on Flaubert when Facebook is only a swipe away, or give your true devotion to Mr. Darcy while Twitter beckons?
People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.
E-mail lurks tantalizingly within reach. Looking up a tricky word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through a quick Google search. And if a book starts to drag, giving up on it to stream a movie over Netflix or scroll through your Twitter feed is only a few taps away.
That adds up to a reading experience that is more like a 21st-century cacophony than a traditional solitary activity. ...NYT
Face it. If you want twitch and fiddle and own and consume, Kindle is perfect. Want to read? That's a different occupation altogether.
As for iPads. they are supposed to knock PC's off the market, according to the Times in another article.
Tablets are not there yet. In 2011, PCs outsold tablets almost six-to-one, estimates Canalys, a technology research company. But that is still a significant change from 2010, the iPad’s first year on the market, when PCs outsold tablets 20-to-one, according to Canalys. For the last two years, PC sales were flat, while iPad sales were booming. The Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook gave the market an additional lift over the holidays. Apple is banking on the tablet market. Its iPad brought in nearly 40 percent more revenue during the holidays than Apple’s own computer business, the Macintosh, did.
“From the first day it shipped, we thought — not just me, many of us thought at Apple — that the tablet market would become larger than the PC market, and it was just a matter of the time that it took for that to occur,” Mr. Cook of Apple said recently at a Goldman Sachs investor conference. ...NYT
Here's a shocker for Apple, though:
Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, estimated that Mr. Cook’s prediction would come true in 2017, but others contend tablets will be on top sooner than that. ...NYT
And PC's -- desktops -- will disappear. That's okay. Laptops will remain, won't they? Some of us want want cameras and phones, but not cameras combined with phones. We're the people who want office work to stay at the office and who don't want to fiddle with technology all the time or, above all, to allow technology to dominate our downtime.
