iPad

Oh dear. Now even the geeks are all riled up at Obama, Tea Party-style. As any technology journalist learns early, one speaks ill of Apple products only at great peril. Few people seemed to mind, as Matthew Yglesias sagely observes, when Obama told predominantly black audiences during the presidential campaign “to turn off the TV and put down the Gameboy.” But throwing the iPad into the mix: “– the hot yuppie gadget du jour and not something people associate with “irresponsible” minority youth … is scrambling the intended message and causing it to be heard in a different light. “

Cue the tar-and-feathers and accusations of hypocrisy. The Christian Science Monitor observes that Obama once gave the queen of England an iPod, and told Rolling Stone reporters what songs were on his own MP3 player. MacDailyNews reminds us that the Obama campaign placed advertisements in 18 different Xbox games! And what about all those reports about how hard it would be for the senator to give up his BlackBerry addiction after becoming president? I guess social media and the Internet are all fine and dandy when they’re helping you win the White House, but once you start seeing how easy it is to spread viral Birther e-mails, you start singing a different tune.

But that’s hardly the most embarrassing aspect to this sordid display of Apple hate. The most cutting blow comes from Dr. Keith Ablow, “a psychiatry correspondent for Fox News Channel.” Obama is absolutely correct in his assessment of the iPad and other gadgets, writes Ablow. His own election to the presidency is proof of his thesis!

The president is doubly correct. First of all, he is right (as I have written a number of times) that the Internet, Facebook and, yes, the new iPad and many other devices can interfere with people becoming wise and knowledgeable, rather than simply deluged with facts. They can also become estranged from real relationships and from themselves as they become obsessed with pretending to be stars on YouTube or worthy of “followers” on Twitter or popular with thousands of “friends” on Facebook.

Second, Obama is correct because his own ascension to power is a product of those very forces. He used celebrity and star power and the anonymous, pervasive reach of the Web to win his election. He is the iPresident — a product of the very forces that some part of him realizes are synthetic — and without substance and highly addictive. He is, as an early McCain television advertisement suggested, first and foremost, a celebrity in a celebrity-crazed country.

Ablow then pivots off his stunning psychiatric insights into Obama’s character into an attack on healthcare reform, tax credits for new homeowners and Wall Street bailouts. Bet you never saw that coming. But I’m guessing that neither Ablow nor the enraged techies steaming at the iPad slight took the time to read or watch Obama’s entire commencement address. Because first, it exposes as completely idiotic the right-wing fantasy that Obama is somehow not “substantive,” and second, it puts into proper context his critique of some aspects of the modern information age.

We meet here today, as graduating classes have met for generations, not far from where it all began, near that old oak tree off Emancipation Drive. I know my University 101. There, beneath its branches, by what was then a Union garrison, about twenty students gathered on September 17, 1861. Taught by a free citizen, in defiance of Virginia law, the students were escaped slaves from nearby plantations, who had fled to the fort seeking asylum.

After the war’s end, a retired Union general sought to enshrine that legacy of learning. With collections from church groups, Civil War veterans, and a choir that toured Europe, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute was founded here, by the Chesapeake — a home by the sea.

That story is no doubt familiar to many of you. But it is worth reflecting on why it happened; why so many people went to such trouble to found Hampton and all our Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The founders of these institutions knew, of course, that inequality would persist long into the future. They recognized that barriers in our laws, and in our hearts, wouldn’t vanish overnight.

But they also recognized a larger truth; a distinctly American truth. They recognized that with the right education, those barriers might be overcome and our God-given potential might be fulfilled. They recognized, as Frederick Douglass once put it, that “education… means emancipation.” They recognized that education is how America and its people might fulfill our promise. That recognition, that truth– that an education can fortify us to rise above any barriers, to meet any tests — is reflected, again and again, throughout our history.

There is a difference between getting an education and watching the latest viral YouTube clip on your iPad, between establishing a college for the education of freed slaves and rallying 10,000 fans to a Facebook page. And there’s no contradiction between employing any technological means necessary to organize a successful presidential campaign and recognizing that there may be aspects of that technology worth criticizing. To any readers of this post who might be consuming it via iPad, I invite you to push that contradiction to the limit: Watch, and learn:

The popularity of the iPad is clearly one major factor, but buried deep in the story is an intriguing hint of another. Computer systems sales to corporations appear robust, but consumers are holding back:

In a conference call yesterday, [HP CEO Leo] Apotheker bemoaned a “bifurcated” PC market, where companies are spending and consumers aren’t. Sales in the company’s personal systems group fell 5.4 percent to $9.42 billion last quarter.

What could explain such a phenomenon, aside from the iPad craze?

How about the fact that corporate balance sheets are doing great, but unemployment is at 9 percent?

It’s been the big story of the last two years. There’s an economic recovery in the corporate sector, but it hasn’t translated into significant hiring. The data from the PC sector plug right in:

From the Wall Street Journal:

As economic growth turned up in 2009 and earnings started to rebound, businesses began to spend on new equipment, machinery and software. Such spending has steadily increased since mid-2009, and rose 15 percent in 2010 after falling 15 percent in 2009 and 2.4 percent in 2008.

That has helped make businesses more efficient, enabling them to do more with fewer employees.

There’s your “bifurcated” market. Corporations investing their profits in technology upgrades that allow them to squeeze more work out of fewer employees, while consumers — excluding those who have succumbed to the lure of the iPad — hold fire and stay chained to last year’s model.

When Steve Jobs debuted the iPad 15 months ago, critical appraisals were all over the map, from effusive to dismissive, but I don’t think even the most gaga fanboy predicted that in little more than year the tablet would have meaningfully reshaped the entire personal computing industry.

But the symbolism here is even more powerful. In 1991, Apple was still pumping out popular products — that year the company introduced its first serious laptop, the PowerBook 100, along with its high-end Quadra and the iconic-looking Mac Classic II.

Then, in April 1992, Microsoft released Windows 3.1 and brought the mouse and multitasking to the PC masses. And that was that. Apple’s attempt to sue Microsoft for coopting the “look and feel” of the Macintosh in earlier iterations of the Windows operating system failed miserably, and for most of the 1990s, the company was an also-ran. Die-hard Apple lovers still claimed aesthetic superiority over the commodified Windows-Intel nexus, but they were like yapping Chihuahuas — indefatigable and noisy but hardly dangerous. Microsoft proceeded to throw its weight across the entire industry, crushing its competitors and even shrugging off the best antitrust efforts of Bill Clinton’s Department of Justice.

And yet now the iPad and the iPhone rule supreme — where litigation failed, a superior design philosophy has triumphed, at least for now. It’s one of the most extraordinary stories in the history of personal computing.