Newsweek's Fake Steve Sleepwalks Through Ipad Coverage

Dan Lyons of Newsweek became as famous as business writers get for his blog "Fake Steve Jobs," in which he assumed the character of an uninhibited Steve Jobs writing about the world around him.  It was brilliant, irreverent and true.

Which is why it is tragic that his column on the launch of the Ipad, instead of going for funny, goes for sentimentality about Apple and technology that borders on mawkish.

At the very least, we had hoped a tablet from Apple would do something new, something we've never seen before. That's not the case. Jobs and his team kept using words like "breakthrough" and "magical," but the iPad is neither, at least not right now. It might turn out to be magical for Apple, because what Jobs is really doing here is trying to replace the personal computer with a closed appliance that runs software only from Apple's online App Store. So instead of selling you a laptop and never hearing from you again, Apple gets an ongoing revenue stream with iPad as you keep downloading more apps. That really is "magical"—for Apple's bottom line, anyway.

Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, covers the same point in his blog post on the subject but absent the whining and gets the point across more clearly and directly. 

The iPad borrows a little from phones, and a little from laptops, and a little from their own iPod and iTouch, and a little from the Kindle. It's better in some ways than all of those things, but less portable than its smaller cousins, less functional than a laptop, and more expensive than a Kindle. There's no comparison that is a clean win.

Name technology columnists for major magazines shouldn't be out-written on their core subjects by cartoonists, even ones as insightful as Adams.

Comments

[Clayton]

Agreed, good point