Apple, postmodern consumerism and the iPad
<p>It&#8217;s not very often that I feel impelled to quote someone else&#8217;s blog post in its entirety, But Ann Althouse <a href="http://althouse.blogspot.com/2010/04/ipad-is-kind-of-like-twitter.html">says of the iPad</a>&#8230;</p>
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I have it, and I feel like I could be using it. But I don&#8217;t really use it. Maybe I think I&#8217;m going to be using it. But I also think it&#8217;s possible that I&#8217;m never going to use it. I seem to have a need for it, but I have other things that fit that need that I go back to instead over and over again. And yet there it is, over there. I think I&#8217;m going to be going there, maybe later. Maybe tomorrow.
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<p>Amazing. The iPad is the ultimate Steve Jobs device &#8211; so hypnotic that not only do people buy one without knowing what it&#8217;s good for, they keep feeling like they ought to use it even when they have better alternatives for everything it does.  It&#8217;s a triumph of style over substance, cool over utility, form over actual function. The viral YouTube videos of cats and two-years-olds playing with it speak truth in their unsurpassable combination of draw-you-in cuteness with utter pointlessness. It&#8217;s the perfect lust object of postmodern consumerism, irresistibly attractive but empty &#8211; you know you&#8217;ve been played by the marketing and design but you don&#8217;t care because your complicity in the game is part of the point.</p>
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<p>This has to be Steve Jobs&#8217;s last hurrah.  I predict this not because he is aging and deathly ill, but because he can&#8217;t possibly top this. It is the ne plus ultra of where he has been going ever since the Mac in 1984, with his ever-more obsessive focus on the signifiers of product-design attractiveness.  And it&#8217;s going to make Apple a huge crapload of money, no question.</p>
<p>But what comes after this?  After reading Althouse, I&#8217;m getting the feeling that the ultimate may also be terminal.  The way I thought the iPad was going to go was to get disrupted from below by less expensive, less locked-down Android tablets. Now I&#8217;m not sure there&#8217;s enough reality there to sustain the product <em>category</em> at all. The entire segment might well turn into as huge a bust as PDAs were in the 1990s.  And that means that over the medium term, two to three years out, Apple is in even more trouble than I thought. </p>
<p>I&#8217;ve alluded before to the fact that the two most fanatical and longest-term Mac loyalists among my face-to-face friends are carrying Nexus Ones now, having migrated from Sidekicks but passing up the iPhone.  The fact that Jobs couldn&#8217;t get <em>these</em> two people to change cellphone providers to worship at his shrine tells me more about the fading of Apple&#8217;s magic than the hot air and bullshit in a dozen market surveys. Apple has bet its company on the Jobs philosophy, but at the same time I see it losing the adhesive loyalty of the fanbase that&#8217;s been with it since the Mac Classic.</p>
<p>Fast-forward this a couple years and I can see Apple in hell, committed to sexy overpriced products that nobody actually needs, undercut by Android from all directions, and subsisting on a decaying aura of pop-cultural cool.  Because that&#8217;s what tends to happen when you put yourself in the fashion business and you&#8217;re past your peak; those who live by hipness get to die by it too.</p>
