The Bad Philosophy Behind the iPad

I find Apple's recent release of the iPad a bit troubling. It's not the name, though I think I've seen every period and pad joke possible on Twitter by now. It's not even its overgrown iPhone look; in fact, I think the idea of the device and what it can do is pretty awesome. What worries me is the philosophy behind the product.

When my old-school mobile flip-phone began to fall apart after years and years of use, I received an iPhone to replace it. The device is beautiful, from how it looks, to the colourful icons, to what I can do with it. No matter where I am, I can Google, GPS, e-mail and surf. Sometimes I make phone calls, too.

But the iPhone soon proved to suffer from the same issues as the Mac computer I owned in university: it only lets you do what it thinks you should be doing. If you try to sway from that, you're stuck and you either accept it or get creative under the hood. Don't believe me? Fire up your Mac and try to configure iMail to be a little more useful than just its barebone setup. Or if the metallic surface of the GUI is getting tiring on the eye, try replacing it. You can't. And that's just the simple stuff.

The iPhone is different from a Mac computer as it is even more limited: it only allows you to install software that is Apple approved: this creates a closed system that does not promote a different kind of usage you may have in mind.

I know Apple is all about thinking differently, but I guess our definitions of thinking differently really are: Apple creates beautiful closed tools that allow you to create beautiful things. Meanwhile, I want a beautiful product I can customize completely so that it does what I want it to do. With the iPhone, I had to void the warranty just to change how it looked. I had to install non-approved third-party software to allow the iPhone to act like a WIFI hotspot when I want to share my connection on the go. And because I'm a Linux user, I have to run an SSH daemon on the phone to upload my music that I play with a third-party player: the iTunes database is now encrypted to prevent people like me from using non Apple-approved operating systems. I'm not abandoning my favourite OS just so I can use my iPhone to Apple's idealized full-potential. But that's the price you pay if you're not a member of the Church of Apple: you miss out on the features.

So take all those limitations, make it illegal to circumvent any of the systems with the strict DRM, add advertising you can't skip and that's the iPad: a multi-media device which has very little at to do with personal computing. And with Apple's filing of a patent that forces uses to interact with an ad, the iPad is nothing more than a next-generation television set that can handle other forms of easily-purchasable entertainment, while still pushing product placement in front of us that we can't escape by changing the channel. And if you try to get around it, you go to jail.

Yes, Apple is entitled to sell whatever it wants and to have it operate in any way it sees fit. I just hope that this different kind of thinking does not become the de-facto standard of the future of computing, because it seems to steer completely away from the message that was being delivered by the company that made this commercial: