The iPad? Well, it’s not exactly the Apple of my eye

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This morning’s Observer column.

The essence of the iPad is that it's a good device for passive ‘consumption’ of preprepared multimedia content. That’s why the old media dinosaurs are salivating about it: it seems to offer them a way of regaining control of the customer – and of ensuring that s/he pays for content. And one can understand why they are so charmingly deluded about this: all apps have to come through the iTunes store and can be charged for. No wonder Murdoch & co love the device. They think it’ll rescue them from the wild west web, where people believe that content should be free. Yeah, and pigs will also fly in close formation.

It’s when one tries to use the iPad for generating content that its deficiencies become obvious. The biggest flaw is the absence of multitasking, so you have to close one app to open another, which is a bit like going back to the world of MS-DOS…

See also my diary of a week with the device.

In memoriam

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On a seat on a coastal path. According to this source, he was an artist specialising in bird-life. It’s a nice way to be remembered: the seat overlooks a mere where there were lots of diving (and squabbling) ducks this morning.

A pine start in life

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Until this morning, wandering through a beautiful little pine-wood, I had no idea what pine cones looked like in their formative phase.

And then I came on this.

When we disturbed the branch, a dense cloud of very fine pollen wafted into the air.

Flickr version here.

New Yorker Editor: “I opted for clueless”

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New Yorker editor, David Remnick, on the vexed question of paywalls.

“I was going to be damned if I was going to train 18-year-olds, 20-year-olds, 25-year-olds, that this is like water that comes out of the sink,” he said, about The New Yorker.

Mr. Remnick was speaking at a breakfast for advertisers and some reporters in the Condé Nast Executive Dining Rooml last Tuesday morning. He said that if you want expensive reporting, then you’ll have to pay for it. Let’s just say that Mr. Remnick probably isn’t going to get a lunch with Jeff Jarvis or Arianna Huffington anytime soon and talk Web religion.

“There have been many stages of Web evangelical thinking. You must do this! You have to do that! Or you are clueless,” clucked Mr. Remnick.

“Remember the days of information wants to be free?” he continued. “So therefore the only thing that anyone with any brains could do with a magazine like The New Yorker is to put the whole thing online and give it away. Give it away! And if you were against that in some way or you said, ‘Wait a minute,’ you were–wait for it–clueless.

“I opted for clueless,” he said.

Mr. Remnick spoke about the magazine's digital edition (which is its own animal, accessible for a $39.95 fee for people who don’t subscribe to the print edition) and how some content is still free on the web. He's figuring it out, just like everyone else. He’s not in a rush. But when he does figure it out, you will be paying. Two weeks ago, Mr. Remnick told the London-based Arabic paper Asharq Al-Awsat that there are “millions” of people who will willingly pay for the news.

Well, I’d be willing to pay for the New Yorker . In fact, I already do — through the nose for the print edition. But it’s surprising that his magazine’s legendary fact-checkers didn’t pick him up on one point — tapwater isn’t free. We pay water rates or water charges for it.

Jobs: Great unwashed don’t need PCs

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Hmmm… This from TechEye.

It is official: Steve Jobs no longer thinks that PCs are going to be that important.

Speaking at the D8 conference, the Apple supremo said the day is coming when only one out of "every few people" will need a traditional computer.

For evidence he said that when the US was an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that's what you needed on the farms.

"Cars became more popular as cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic transmission became popular," he said.

He thinks that PCs are going to be like trucks. They are still going to be around… but only "one out of x people will need them."

Of course x is an unknown figure so Jobs is hedging his bets a bit. He could mean that only one in ten people will need one or one in two. It is a moot point if very many people need one now, but whether or not they own one is another matter.

Jobs claimed that advances in chips and software will allow tablet devices like the iPad to do tasks that today are really only suited for a traditional computer, things like video editing and graphic arts work.

He said that the move will make many PC veterans uneasy, "because the PC has taken us a long way."

"We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it's uncomfortable," he said.

Needless to say, Ray Ozzie doesn’t agree.

BP: beyond irony

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Stephen Hsu posted this image on his blog under the heading “BP advertisement from 1999”. The date (1999) seems improbable, in that BP didn’t enter the US market until 1998 (when it merged with Amoco) and the logo wasn’t launched until the company rebranded itself as BP plc in 2001. That doesn’t mean that the image of the ad is faked, only that the date attributed to it is wrong. Whatever the truth of the matter, it’s clever.

LATER: Mystery solved. Dermot Casey tweets that it’s from a t-shirt made by Despair Inc..

Quote of the day

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“The brains of members of the Press departments of motion-picture studios resemble soup at a cheap restaurant. It is wiser not to stir them.”

P.G. Wodehouse, Blandings Castle and Elsewhere