The, i-pad, the newly hailed king of technologies has recently hit the US market, and is slowly making its way eastwards, advertised by Apple as ‘a magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price’. At $499, ‘unbelievable’ is the word… although I believe Apple, I think it’s cheap and I think it’s not?!?!
It has the capability to run around 150,000 apps, yes, 150,000. These range, inevitably, from the useful through to the downright lazy and ludicrous.
On the useful (ish) scale, you can read the Wall Street Journal, play scrabble on your way to work and you can add up the calories you eat in every meal. And on the barking mad crazy scale? You can turn off the lights in your home, you can take an eye test instead of visiting the opticians, and you can race a Lamborghini around Las Vegas. What on earth?
On the plus side, it’s versatile and easy to use, slim line and very light and basically acts as your television, movie theatre, laptop and mobile phone all in one neat little packet. You can be talking to your mother one moment and be creating a PowerPoint presentation the next. But is this compact little object really such a good thing?
Surely this new technology; rather than enhancing the ability to communicate effectively as I’m sure Alexander Graham Bell intended when he invented the telephone, now takes communication technologies one step further towards ending face to face communication forever. We have reached such a far-fetched level of computer madness that we no longer need to walk to the shops to buy groceries or to see the doctor to get a diagnosis. Is this, the i-pad, not one way to start losing contact with people altogether and in effect live in a ‘Terminator-esque’ world alongside the machines?
Perhaps I’m just old-fashioned?
Contributed by Jenny-Wren Charlton
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