Ok so I know this blog’s been neglected for quite some time. I just can’t find the time or bother to blog much nowadays. The typical day involves 8 to 5.30 work before coming home with barely a few hours to myself. Fridays have never seemed so blissful in my entire life.
Rant…
Anyway, recently got a new laptop, the ASUS G51Jx. Brilliant gaming machine, absolutely terrible computer. I won’t bother ranting much about it here, maybe I’ll post the review I wrote for another site here soon, but until then let’s just say I am sorely regretting getting this machine. Mainly because I could have probably gotten an equally powerful desktop for maybe two thirds the price, and more importantly one that has a BIGGER SCREEN.
1920 by 1080 on a 15 inch screen is way too much. Text is all painfully small for my eyes, and I gotta toggle everything to zoom in. But there are some apps that simply won’t let me enlarge the text (e.g. Steam) and I gotta suffer by squinting at everything it throws on screen.
The solution to this all? Get an iPad for web-surfing.
The iPad was stupid…
The perfect solution IMO, though a thoroughly annoying one for me. When the iPad first launch I was firmly in the camp of what’s-Apple-doing-it’s-just-a-larger-iPod-Touch. In recent weeks, I’ve played around with the iPad twice at Apple stores, and now desperately want one.
Mind you, it’s not just me. For the first time ever, you actually gotta queue up at Apple stores just to play around with one of their products on display. Maybe you’re saying, “Sure, Singaporeans love to queue anyway”. For once though, Singaporeans aren’t just flocking to try the iPad out. At the store in Funan, while I was playing around with the iPad (after having waited for at least 5 minutes), iPads were literally FLYING off shelves. Every single person in the store seemed to be leaving with an iPad in hand. And the majority of them obviously weren’t hardcore Apple fans or anything that would fall for anything Steve Jobs introduced. Most of the people I saw were pretty damn old. You know, the kind who can’t tell a USB port from a rectangular hole. Or the type who couldn’t tell the differenc between a Mac or a PC.
Perhaps that’s what’s so enticing about the iPad. It’s simplicity. The iPod Touch gives off the impression of being a tech-gadget. A small, handy device for the tech-savy, maybe because it resembles mobile phones so much. And older people tend to be intimidated even by their mobile phones. The iPad on the other hand feels like a simplified notebook. A really simplified notebook at that. Why? Because it has a screen comparable to that of a laptop. Sometimes, that’s all you need to do for the tech-illiterate to think it’s really a better version of those complicated laptops.
Apple knows what it’s doing
I guess it doesn’t matter how stupid an Apple product sounds on paper. Fact of the matter is that Apple knows what it’s doing. The tech-savy crowd can scream all they want about how the iPad is a joke, but the fact remains that it appeals to the average consumers in ways no other device has ever done before. Heck, after playing with it for about 10 minutes, I already want one, and I used to think Apple had taken a step in the wrong direction by creating a big iPod Touch.
This goes to show that for all the knowledge we geeks have about technology, we have no idea what really resonates with the majority of people.
