Another great video by Rene Richie regarding the rage whining by techno elite reviewers on YouTube regarding the iPads 15.0 about how it isn’t making the iPad more like a ‘normal laptop’ with all the power and flexibility that macOS has.

The whole rage and whine parade from the techno elite is funny because for such self described technically inclined people they’re unable to grasp the basic concept of the audience the iPad is catering for, which is, those who want a device that is like an appliance – turn it on, watch some videos, surf the net, send a few emails and then turn it off. The self appointed techno elite on YouTube have convinced themselves that what the world needs is a laptop running macOS that has a touch screen – all the telemetry data from Microsoft shows that end users barely use their touch screen long term beyond the honeymoon phase of having a new device. Ever wonder why the big focus of touch screens by Microsoft is all about the use of the pen on the screen so that it is a giant tablet? because that is where the usefulness exists which could be done quite easily (if Apple wanted) by modifying the touch pad to be able to use an Apple Pencil on which would give users all the same benefits of a touch screen but without needing to butcher the whole operating system to make it compatible.

This is yet another example of techno elite on YouTube believing they speak for the average person in much the same way that they got all hyped up about excited about ‘small phones’ – always whining about how the phones these days are too big and there needs to be a smaller mini version. The net result? it was a total sales flop (link), ordinary people want screen sizes that doesn’t require that they squint really hard just to seen the finer details on a small screen. For many, their phone is their computer and no one in their right mind is going to spend hours squinting at a barely readable screen all for the sake of ‘oooh, it’s so small and cute’ which the techno elite seem to be enamoured with.

This is what happens when people confuse the reverberations off the wall as the voices of people also interested in said product when in reality it is just their own voice that they’re hearing as an echo. There are far too many echo chambers online that lack the self awareness to differentiate between what they want as a techno elite on YouTube vs. what the average person wants. There was the same issue with ‘Red Peak’ (flag design during the referendum on a new flag for New Zealand) and ‘TOP’ (The Opportunities Party – during the election back in 2017) where the self appointed techno elite on the New Zealand subreddit convinced themselves that ‘Red Peak’ was more popular that it really was and that because all their friends were supporting TOP it must mean that its of New Zealanders were supporting them as well (which they didn’t – 2.44% of the party vote). All they ended up doing is syphoning off votes from the Green Party resulting in Labour having to form a coalition government with NZ First where as had those votes gone to Greens it would have been a Labour-Greens government and a light rail to the airport but alas here we are 4 years later and still no light rail.

This is what happens when people believe that what happens on the internet reflects the real world. Anyone remember the election in 2020 in the United States and all the noise that KHIVE made on Twitter? funny how that never translated into the real world because noise on twitter doesn’t reflect the real world – in the real world people have lives to live, bills to pay, jobs to go to, kids to take care of, no one cares about online drama apart from a minority of a minority of a minority that confuse noise for crowd size.

Getting back to the original discussion, the benefit of Apple keeping the iPad the simple easy to use device is that it allows the Mac to shine – it doesn’t have to dumb things down, Apple can focus the Mac for the power users who want maximum flexibility and performance where as the iPad is for someone who wants a device that is like an appliance. By Apple not having to worry about trying to be everything to everyone they can gear the iPad for one section of the market and the Mac for a different section of the market thus not requiring the sort of compromise that Microsoft gets stuck in when trying to be everything to everyone but no one ends up being happy in the end.