Saturday, January 30, 2010

iPad: Y'all been done FUTURE PUNKED by Uncle Steve

[UPDATE: For alla youse who don't wanna sift, here's the link for the best analysis of the iPad to date from Frasier Speirs, the Flickr/Aperture Export guy. Thanks me later.]

Hey clubkids, it's your Uncle Drunky with yet more ranty-ravy gravy for you to drank up on. We're nowhere near 2015 yet, but thanks to Uncle Steve we're well on our way. And here's why...

First, I'm going to introduce you to Uncle Steve's X-Man mutant power. And you heard it here first: Future Punking, aka Future Shocking you little plebes for kicks. And he's sooooo good at it, the troll-fu has always been strong with this one. I have to agree with Frasier Spiers and his assessment of the whole iPad thing. Y'all been done Future Shocked. Punked. Future Punked!

I really have respect for Uncle Steve -- he's not one of these all talk and no brain Boomers who talks up a good storm but that's all it is. And he has the moxy ($$$) and the stones to back it up.

I mean, remember the iPhone & iPod Touch? Remember how the pundits came out of the woodwork and dissed it? And remember how fast they went back to their holes? Pretty darned fast.

Uncle Steve has managed to do this 3-4 times in his life. The original Macintosh when he was young, the iPhone, and now.. the iPad.

To my little sahib, Vivek Wadhwa: Stop using the word 'innovation' until you do something like this. And no, the Joo-Joo DOES NOT COUNT. You're not dragging us into the future kicking and screaming like Uncle Steve.

And to the rest of you yobs, what can I say? Other than stop abusing words like 'platform' 'ubiquitous' and especially 'innovation'.

***

Basically, Uncle Steve has written a number of 'Dear John' letters:

Dear Adobe & all your Flash wannabe "developers": Your time on the scene with this Web 2.0 tripe where you get to go <HTML><OBJECT EMBED={bullshit.website} /></HTML> is oooooover. It's too bad the Indiot running your company put all those Flashy eggses in one basket, gollum. Stamping your feet and displaying the Lego bricks of pornsites on a company blog doesn't become you.

Seems the only level headed employee that wasn't laid off was weepy, yet still showing some class of the old Adobe-guard, Jon Nack.

As to the Flash 'developers' with a lower case d-- now you yobs who moved from Javascript to Flash and got all uppity have to go back and sweat the details. No more offshoring your jobs off to Indiots with fluff.CVs or easy money for flying baloney.

You get to sweat HTML5, CSS, data sources and all the stuff that made the web searchable & USEFUL before all this Flash hoo-haa came along to replace animated gif and MIDI. Either adapt or Hamsterdance your way into the sunset.

And what about those Flash to ARM apps via CS5? Up. Hill. Battle. Unless Adobe does some adapt and overcome. Instead of 'pout like a schoolgirl and call names' like what they're currently doing.

Dear Microsoft: You keep that Silverlight stuff on the server and dish HTML5? We cool. Did I mention that MSFT has the size and moxy to get uppity? Really strange that they're a bit more restrained, eh?

Dear Jailbreakers & Hackers: The ones who think the 'good ol' days' are over are the hasbeens and wannabes. Sure your scope may be limited, but the most resourceful of you will soldier on. I'm looking at you, Saurik, and you, Erica Sadun, aka 'Our Lady of Jailbreak'. But all the wannabee, Crapulous etc guys? The get rich quick assholes? You're DONE. Go back to Windows and/or trying to make Mac OSX 'proof of concept' trojans.

They said the iPhone 3GS couldn't be hacked, remember? And guess what? If you reeeeeally want to, I'm sure there will be a hack. Even if there is no hack, you'll be slight more limited by what you can do, but you'll still have something to play with, for you. Besides, do you really wanna jailbreak your Mom's iPad?

Let me re-iterate this: The iPad is for your Mom. Your Dad. The Olds. No, really.

C'mon, you have janky Mini9s running Hackintosh systems, iPhones with 3G Unrestrictor, a Nintendo Wii with Homebrew, right? Jailbreaking an iPad might be fun. But Jailbreaking your Mom's Kindle? Does that make sense? Of course not.

Dear Pundits: As usual, you're all wrong ass wrong. So shaddup. Drunky's Mom (an Old, obviously) loves the idea of the computer coming to her instead of the other way around. She also likes the idea that the iPad is more passive than 'why do I have to do all this keyboard and mouse stuff just to get to where I want to go?' crapola.

Face it. Uncle Steve, like he always does, did his homework. And until you hold one in the store ain't no pudding to even prove.

Heck, I tried to show her what it might be like with her old Mac (dragging stuff out of the Dock until there's only 4 things, showing the soft keyboard on my iPhone), but until the public gets to hold one in their hands you're not going to see the impact.

I predict that there will be DOUBLE the lines you saw with the iPhone 3GS. And the price point? The whole 'leaked $1000 and then made it $499' thing where the WSJ got punked by a leak? Well that's Uncle Steve's little Future Punkin' secret sauce. And $499 is über cheap! I think the non-3G pad is going to sell like hotcakes.

Dear 'PC Repair' or Hobbyist Yobs: Better brush up on your networking skills. Because you're the new Maytag repairman. There's NOTHING to repair in an appliance. When was the last time you 'repaired' an iPod or iPhone?

Sorry, but along with the Hacker-wannabes, unless you adapt you're on the endangered species list. Because, and I predict, Personal Computers as major appliance are on their way out, at least with the civilians. And the price of this exodus is the loss of a couple wiggly boob Flash enabled pr0nsites and video sites that don't go to the HTML5 <video> tag. Even Youtube has seen the writing on the wall.

You saw the beginning of this wave with the emergence of smartphones. Now there's a something that you don't have to squint into? That you can passively read? That 'just connects' to the internet 3G for the price of cheap DSL? Maybe the only internet tool in a retiree's house? Who will be making up the bulk of the population over the next 10 years?

Think about that one, and where you fit into the equation. The answer is, you don't.

Dear Outsource / Offshore Indiots: Now you really have to learn that stuff that you put on your resumes. C, Objective C, Cocoatouch, Unix. No more of this lie about one and do the other, because Uncle Steve has slammed the door on your so called 'innovative business model'. Don't expect to get anywhere in the new world order unless you pay your dues and REALLY LEARN Unix-based platforms, because that's all Google and Apple do.

But you'll learn that soon enough. Or just go back to camel jockeying dumb new media yobs around the old country.

**

The fact of the matter is that Uncle Steve done FUTURE PUNKED alla you. Great is the power of the TROLL master who FU's you in material form. In this case, the iPad.

There's really only three Boomer mastas of Troll-Fu. Uncle George (Lucas), Uncle Shoji (Kawamori), and Uncle Steve (Jobs). And now you know why Uncle Steve is on my shortlist.

-Mentok out.


"The iPhone Developer's Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone 3.0 SDK (2nd Edition)" (Erica Sadun)

3 comments:

Fijai Cairo said...

Haha. Spot on. Funny how the "smart' techies do not get it. They are so stuck in yesterday with no imaginations. Yeah right, like I give a rats about having a USB port on an iPad. What for exactly? Uncle Steve pulled a Henry Ford on them. These wannabe geeks were waiting for a faster horse but Uncle pulled out a Model-T.
The sharper kids are busy downloading the sdk and going thru the documentation.

http://trnsfrmr.com/tag/ipad/

Walt French said...

@Drunky unky, there's so much to agree with that I *almost* held back from dissing your xenophobia.

The Indian coders have decent educations and a strong will to succeed AND are willing to take a tenth the pay of US citizens with comparable skills. If they're a threat to American workers, then here's my call to arms: prove our superiority of skills that will justify our monstrous superiority in income. Call it a wakeup call, a favor, just as the Democrats recently were awarded in Massachusetts. Time to do something about it other than, as Adobe seems to think is a smart business plan, whine.

Otherwise, I agree with you that the Cupertino Messiah Complex Man (or is it “Taliban”?) offers a damn sight better chance for that leadership than anything we see oozing out of Redmond or Adobe's dev shops in wherever.

Mentok said...

Thanks for your thoughts, gents... yes, Uncle Steve IS doing the Model T again, in that paradigm of you can have it any way you like as long as it has a bezel and...

Walt, what can I say? I have friends who diss the Chinese and big up the Indian folks, whereas my experience has been the exact opposite, AND our south asian friends cry 'racism' when called on their misconduct here in my country. I just won't stand for that.

Guest workers who fake it are not suitable workers nor guests and they need to go. That's how it works everywhere else but in the USA, even in India.

Luckily, we DO live in a free country, where 'political correctness' is starting to give way to pragmatism, and the 1st Amendment still holds....

At least today....

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