From James Fallows, On the Moral Splendor of the Early Adopter
I find that the early adopter mentality is widely misunderstood: Journalists going for a sociological angle on the people in line for iPads, for example, focus on a desire for status or attention, or to be first on the block. They completely miss the point. They don’t understand that the desire is for the thing itself and for what it can do; that we imagined this device before it was announced; that we’re constantly bumping up against the limitations of what’s available today; and that when these things finally appear in stores, we say “At last!” And then we buy them, and use them, and immediately get frustrated with its shortcomings and start waiting for the day when the next model comes out.
I hated using my iPhone in public when it was still considered new, and I still do not like using my iPad where other people might see it. You might not believe me, but I really do not care about the status or attention. I just wanna do cool stuff with it.
The quote explains a little bit more eloquently why I care: “we imagined this device before it was announced”. Well, that’s not totally true, I could imagine the device only once I had experienced the iPhone and the iPad was announced by Jobs. But then my imagination took off. I was already going paperless, and this would be the final piece to the puzzle. With the iPad, I now have at all times all my journal articles and academic e-books with me, I can annotate them using my finger, and I can feed these annotations back into a database so I can search for them when I need to write. It beats having to carry around a stack of papers, and it is a relief that I no longer have to go through stacks and boxes of papers just because I misremembered where I read that one particular quote I needed for my paper. That’s not to say that the iPad is perfect (really, what is?). I get the arguments against it (a closed system governed by a system best described as enlightened dictatorship, the case against generativity). But it also is truly transformative for how I manage my research and practice my writing.
People who are still asking “So what is the Ipad for?” or suggesting that it is just a bigger iPhone, even though it now has been out two months? Sorry, but maybe that’s just a lack of imagination.