Nick Bilton:
Why? Well, I didn’t knock their baby teeth out, that’s for sure. Instead, I said something slightly negative about an Apple product.
First of all, when you title your follow-up article “When Apple Fanboys Attack,” you’re probably going to get some shit.
Second, it wasn’t a negative article about Apple that I had a problem with. It’s the fact that you seemed to ignore all of the creation possibilities on the iPad.
You said:
Although there are hundreds of third party products available, Apple doesn’t seem to want the iPad to be a creator, but more of a consumer.
That’s just not true.
Nick appeared to narrow the focus of what he considers creating content means in his article today to typing. Clearly you can do more than that.
I asked Nick on Twitter if he had a chance to actually use the Surface1, but he didn’t respond.
Update: Nick Bilton changed the headline of his article from “When Apple Fanboys Attack” to “When Zealots Attack”
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And by extension the keyboard he seems to like so much. ↩
Nick has too many holes in his story. I create on my iPad every single day.
I use apps like: vjay, Codea, iMovie, Blogsy, Textastic, Pages, Keynote. Just to name a few.
The iPad has plenty of options for bluetooth keyboards, keyboards that we know actually work, not just keyboards that have pretty colors.
The headline may have changed, but the slug in the URL hasn’t.
Yeah….getting a few facts (opinions, really) wrong (not in agreement with yours, really) provides people with sufficient justification to call the writer an “idiot” and evidently a few other choice words. I would have left the title at “Apple Fanboys” because that’s exactly what they are. Dare criticize the almighty Apple and you feel their wrath, straight from the dank and moldy depths of their mother’s basements. Pathetic…
Funnily, many of those in the so-called “creative” camp share this conviction: Microsoft = “productivity”, and Adobe = “creative”. If it’s not a currency cell, or a bezier, it can’t be “real” work. And, fair enough, there are a lot of tasks that are likely to suck on any small touch screen device for some time: spreadsheeting and coding, in small amounts, are fine, but would I do it all day on an iPad, over a desktop?
But what many of those creatives are oddly missing, particularly those with their Wacom tablets, are the things a touch screen can not only do, but do better than a desktop. Watching preschools draw and paint with their fingers, playing with drum machines, and strumming chords should be the clue, but hits a blind spot.
Anyhoo, career day comes and goes, and no one says “I want to be more productive!” or “I want to be a content creator!” But if you ask them what they’re doing with the iPad as you pass by, you may just get “Makin’ stuff.”
You’re right. It’s horribly unfair to call Bilton an idiot. Rather, let’s call him an insufferable narcissist for assuming that what he does is the only possible instantiation of the concept of “productivity”. To be fair, that’s par for the course for most tech commentary, so I suppose we should give him a pass on that too.
Except that he did get facts wrong. He started off with a premise that you can’t use an iPad to create. That is completely wrong. And saying so is why he was called an idiot.
Now had he written of the issue of whether Microsoft was making the smarter move to make their own thin keyboard versus Apple’s tactic of leaving such forms to the 3rd party companies to market to those that aren’t comfortable with using a soft keyboard he would have been in a better position for his comments to come off as logical.
I’m grateful that Bilton’s standardless writing isn’t the rule for every traditional periodical that has added bloggers to its online offerings.
I bought my iPad 2 when it came out in 2011 and I have used it as my primary computer since. Being a college student, I take notes on it, I have written papers in Pages. I have used Numbers for my Finance class case studies. God I hate it when people say you can’t create on iPad. What’s surprising is my typing on iPad’s virtual keyboard is much faster I bought Apple wireless keyboard just to try the experience. I found that I rarely use it. So now I also hate when people say iPads are not for work because they don’t have “real” keyboards.
Apparently, Mr. Bilton doesn’t spend as much time actually interacting online as he claims to.
No, dare to simply make up crap and get called out for it. Saying the iPad is not for creation is both lazy and wrong. There’s lots of software and hardware, some of it by Apple, that ends that argument right away. Criticize Apple all you want, but put in the work.
The other thing that bothers me is the credulous coverage of the Surface as some sort of productivity savior given that basically nobody has really used one, and it’s not even out yet. The keyboard covers look cool, but people are writing like we’re in some alternate universe where good keyboards for the iPad haven’t since the first generation model. That’s simply not the case.