it's never over til it's over
bill gates thought he had trounced steve jobs once and for good back when his windows piece of crap operating system caught on with enough cheap hardware producers that his operating system (and thus as well his applications) "won" the platform war. (bill g even fended off netscape and left us with the pile of stinking garbage that is "internet explorer" to threaten to spoil the entire internet for good measure). NOBODY was going to stake any claim to any turf that was anywhere near the microsquish monopoly on the PC, and all we witless consumers had the endless technical future to pay for it.
fast forward a few years to steve jobs' brilliant riposte which was neither a macbook or an imac or anything else remotely resembling the hulking pile of crap which continued to be the windows dinosaur, but, rather, an innocuous looking single-purpose convenience called an ipod, which morphed into the multi-purpose and way cool iphone, which has once again transformed itself into the brawny ipad from which all things PC now gain their final obsolescence.
it's my children's privilege (and cross to bear in a different sense) to possess parents of sufficient affluence that they should have been given their own state-of-the-art homework machines upon entry to high school. the first two, poor saps, arrived while laptops were the standard, so got more windows BS and an endless stream of service trips and blue-screen-of-death headaches. but the third one--the golden child--had presence of mind to be born into the age of the ipad, and it's her joy to be given an entirely new world into which to come of age. "ms word" for the laptops? hundreds of wasted dollars and many more wasted hours than that trying to wrestle it to produce what they preferred. "pages" for the ipad? 9.99 and it kicks that other software's ass so soundly as to put even a jaded old cuss like me into instant awe. (oh, and it reads and produces ms word format files if you really want to keep one foot in the stone age).
gates and company never got it, just the same way they never really got what a stinking, steaming pile of ultimate horseshit their PC's were and continue to be. oh, yeah, they pocketed some major bucks from the stock market during the glory years, but find me someone who still actually runs a zune, and i'll show you someone even more witless than the company which duped them to buy it. that ipad of my daughters is an amazing thing, and for $600 running circles around anything and everything windows has to offer, from cheap knock-offs to top-dollar "gaming" systems. the competition isn't even close. word processing? just toss in an easy 10 bucks. (have you priced word for a pc lately? frightening...) apps for drawing and recording music and creating anything her imagination prefers are equally cheap when they aren't next to free.
it's a whole new world out there, and it's never over til it's over. bill gates, like tim tebow, can suck it.
fast forward a few years to steve jobs' brilliant riposte which was neither a macbook or an imac or anything else remotely resembling the hulking pile of crap which continued to be the windows dinosaur, but, rather, an innocuous looking single-purpose convenience called an ipod, which morphed into the multi-purpose and way cool iphone, which has once again transformed itself into the brawny ipad from which all things PC now gain their final obsolescence.
it's my children's privilege (and cross to bear in a different sense) to possess parents of sufficient affluence that they should have been given their own state-of-the-art homework machines upon entry to high school. the first two, poor saps, arrived while laptops were the standard, so got more windows BS and an endless stream of service trips and blue-screen-of-death headaches. but the third one--the golden child--had presence of mind to be born into the age of the ipad, and it's her joy to be given an entirely new world into which to come of age. "ms word" for the laptops? hundreds of wasted dollars and many more wasted hours than that trying to wrestle it to produce what they preferred. "pages" for the ipad? 9.99 and it kicks that other software's ass so soundly as to put even a jaded old cuss like me into instant awe. (oh, and it reads and produces ms word format files if you really want to keep one foot in the stone age).
gates and company never got it, just the same way they never really got what a stinking, steaming pile of ultimate horseshit their PC's were and continue to be. oh, yeah, they pocketed some major bucks from the stock market during the glory years, but find me someone who still actually runs a zune, and i'll show you someone even more witless than the company which duped them to buy it. that ipad of my daughters is an amazing thing, and for $600 running circles around anything and everything windows has to offer, from cheap knock-offs to top-dollar "gaming" systems. the competition isn't even close. word processing? just toss in an easy 10 bucks. (have you priced word for a pc lately? frightening...) apps for drawing and recording music and creating anything her imagination prefers are equally cheap when they aren't next to free.
it's a whole new world out there, and it's never over til it's over. bill gates, like tim tebow, can suck it.
posted by kad barma at 12:32 PM
2 Comments:
I am a Mac user (iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air). My first computer was an Apple II, on which I wrote a 103 page (double spaced) paper for Army War College, back in 1983 (Strategic Importance of the Philippines). But, I have used other iron, both at home and at work. Including a Wang while on the Joint Staff.
I agree that the late Steve Jobs has it hands down over Bill Gates, but the PC is cheaper, if less capable and much less user friendly. In 1960, when I was using an electric typewriter, which was a step up from the manual my Father purchased at Naval Surplus in 1957, I would have been amazed to have a Microsoft Word program on a PC.
Your key word was affluence.
Regards — Cliff
Again the fault of the writer not to more clearly communicate the point... A Windows PC is a few hundred bucks--for example they start at $300 on Dell's website. An iPad for what you might consider a more affluent family can be had for $500. But here's the catch: To put MS Word on your $300 beast you need to chip in another $100. To put Pages on your $500 iPad it's just ten bucks. The prices on processing are shifting. Apple is becoming not only better, but cheaper at the same time. And if you consider everything already on board the iPad, from cameras to wireless, (not on the bargain basement PC), you're getting much more, not just a little bit more, with Apple now. It's a brave new world.
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