The greatest hoax since Google in China.
My favorite Google-ism, besides the logo alterations on holidays, is the annual April Fools Joke. (It’s almost as good as the Fake Daily.) My favorite of my favorites was a prank from 2008: Google Custom Time. With Google Custom Time, you can time-stamp your emails to an earlier date or time, thereby eliminating the time constraint on papers due at midnight or the stress of a first-come, first-served offer. But Google only allows ten time-altered messages a year. Any more, and users would begin to “lose faith in the accuracy of time.”
I’m constantly on the lookout for jokes like this. Not only are they hilarious, but I’m unusually gullible. (I fell for, “Did you know FDR was actually 7 feet tall?”) Wanting to appreciate the joke without being the butt of it, I’ve learned to be exceedingly suspicious. Joaquin Phoenix on Letterman? Please. Boy in a silver balloon? Yeah, right. Sarah Palin a politician? –This one has lasted an uncomfortably long time.
I’m getting pretty good at spotting fakes, which is why I rolled my eyes when I floated across the mention of an “iPad” on my Facebook feed. Please. There had been so much hype about the Apple “Tablet” that this joke was actually some time in coming. Imagine my shock, my horror, when I discovered that my mother’s hilarious malapropism of iPod was actually — unfortunately — an item of its own.
But then I remembered — I’m terribly gullible. FDR wasn’t 7 feet tall! Santa wasn’t real! So, Steve Jobs, here I am, calling your bluff. Ladies and gentlemen: the iPad is a hoax.As proof of my discovery, I’ll walk you through the iPad commercial and indicate which bits call the veracity of the product into question.
Opening line: “When something exceeds your ability to understand how it works, it sort of becomes magical.”
–I think that pretty much wraps it up right there. What kind of marketing is this? Why play the “we’re actually magicians” card now? Actually, the most astonishing Apple device yet is that new generation of Shuffles — not only do they talk to you, they can do roughly eighteen different things with only two buttons. And really, if anything Apple has done is magical, it was convincing my father to spend $500 more on my sister’s computer than on mine by giving hers two extra features and a sexier shell.
“I don’t have to change myself to fit the product. It fits me.”
Actually, you do. You have to hold it with one hand and mess with it in the other, and then switch hands when the holding hand gets tired, but then switch back before the first hand gets truly rested because, let’s face it, you’re not as ambidextrous as you’d like to be. Oh, you can buy a stand for it, of course, but then you’ve just spent a lot of money on both a stand and a really big, non-call-making iPhone (unless you get Skype), and since you already have the 27″ iMac upstairs, you got played for a fool.
At 1:46 in the commercial, an article from Spin Magazine is displayed on the iPad. This article is about the up-and-coming French indie band Phoenix (which I highly recommend). One of their albums: Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.
HELLO — Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix :: Phoenix :: Joaquin Phoenix! Am I a conspiracy theorist, or the only one to see the connection? Plus, the background music at this point is Ben Folds’ “In Between Days” (which I also highly recommend). If there were any truth or integrity in this ad, Phoenix’s “Lisztomania” would be playing.
Ease of web surfing: “Take the New York Times. You can see all the top stories, they’re all just right there… It’s completely natural, you don’t even think about it!”
NYT is having a fit right now, a fit. It’s all so natural because it… resembles a newspaper. You know, like the ones actually made out of paper. The ones becoming extinct like the rainforests that made them. Keep this up, iPad, and you’ll have no newspapers to broadcast beautifully. (No online subscriptions for this crowd — Apple customers will fork it over for pretty screens, but they’re the same demographic that made Napster a problem.)
Photos: “If you want to share [the photo you're looking at] with a friend, you can just flip over the iPad” — the speaker flips it bottom-to-top, vertically — “and the iPad automatically flips the photo to the correct orientation.”
…I presume I don’t have to illustrate what’s odd here, but just in case: is it too much trouble to turn the thing around from from right to left? You don’t even have to use your wrists that way, you just cross your arms! But perhaps I’m over-thinking this. I’ll move on.
Movies: “This is an unbelievable device for watching video.”
No CD or DVD drive. Gotta buy from iTunes. (And they were definitely referring to “movies”, not just free video content — Star Trek was playing!)
Calendar, and iBooks.
Okay, these are cool. Or they would be, if this were a real product. (But really — move over, Kindle.)
Apps: “There’s going to be a whole new gold rush for app developers.”
Jobs, come on. Don’t get the hopes of aspiring student app developers up. We’ll fall all the harder.
The big sell: “This is a new category, but yet millions and millions of people are going to be instantly familiar with it. They’re going to know how to use it. In many ways, this defines our vision, our sense of what’s next.”
Now, that I believe. A product we instantly understand, love, and come to depend on entirely is Apple’s MO. But also crucial to the action plan is the near-immediate replacement of our newest can’t-live-without with something else that makes its predecessor obsolete.
It’s a beautiful commercial — and I’m not entirely convinced the main speaker isn’t Bono-sans-shades. If only it were real — if only the tablet weren’t a bigger iPhone that gave your hand cramps, put newspapers out of business, gave a new generation of web developers hope and made shopping at iTunes and iBooks an absolute must. But I know a hoax when I see one. They named the thing the iPad.
It just doesn’t hold water.
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All your readers are fully absorbed in your last pun there.. (Gross, Apple)
Now, I really don’t know much about technology n stuff, but to me me it looks like it’s missing the most obvious feature: if it’s a “tablet” why can’t you write on it? With one of those plastic stylus stick pen things? This iPod on HGH doesn’t seem particularly useful for taking to class or taking notes on (or for writing love letters to Apple to tell them how much we love the new toy), since you’d have to be pinging away fingertip by fingertip on that oh-so-sleek sensor filled “keyboard”. I suppose you can take it to class on days you just really, really don’t want to pay attention (soooo many apps to play with, man!)
so true — a tablet you can’t even write on?! It’s a fake, I’m telling you.
The best comment I’ve seen so far on the awful name has been this from a one “AHOLMES”:
“good luck getting your boyfriend to go buy one for you.”
via:
Some Thoughts on the Coming iPad Backlash — Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/01/some_thoughts_on_the_coming_ip.html#ixzz0dtC8OBtS
So now that you know it wasn’t a fake, you should criticize it for being a letdown: It’s a giant iTouch that can’t do anything because it’s a piece of crap.
In response to the jealous poke at me: I don’t think Apple is magical, it is just “pro” at making computers look sexy. Unlike its competitor. Even the commercial proves that. (*cough* Justin Long *cough*)
Good product review. Thanks. Agreement on tablet point too. Even John Boy could write on his Big Chiefs. The iPad seems to have as many shortcomings as this author’s parentals.
The ipad is real, go fuck yourself, all you stupid people who don’t understand what the point is of the ipad and all that shit. The ipad is a bigger version of the ipodtouch, thus making it easier to search the web because the older buyers where having promblems browsing the web with a small screen. it can do a lot of shit its just the you bitches can’t afford it
Why can’t people just realize that Apple is little more than a glorified Microsoft… without all the money in the Research and Development. The Ipad is a glorified iphone which is a blatant rip-off of every PDA that was on the market for over a decade.
So the real question is… do I want to support a company that publicly attacks it’s competitors (As if the Palm Pre was ever going to take a major chunk of market share, yet Jobs still ran his mud slinging campaigns.) And blatantly steals technology and design from leading competitors (It’s rather funny that everytime someone comes out with something to detract away from the i-phone that Apple takes all of 30 min to update their product and sell it again. (If you think any /serious/ hardware updates are going on, you’re retarded… it’s software updates, the hardware changes are just to cover the lie.)
Let alone apple is 100% proprietary, so not only are you stuck with a company that doesn’t do it’s own research… but one that doesn’t even SHARE it’s product with the so called “developers”. Apple makes certain the only thing you can do with their product is what they want… which means that you’re getting scammed 3x over.
Once for buying it, another because people can’t “hack” their devices to give you features that millions of people could program in a heart beat… and a third time for having to buy the software update that adds the FEATURES THAT WERE SUPPOSE TO BE THERE.
Don’t support terrorism. Don’t buy apple products.
Looks like your pretty awful at spotting fakes huh?
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