Chicago Tribune Editorial: iPad envy…and hope

Chicago Tribune Editorial: iPad envy…and hope
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
5:46 p.m. CDT, April 2, 2010
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-ipad-20100402,0,3956472,full.story


Sometime soon, you'll be on the train or in a trendy restaurant and you will behold the ethereal glow of Apple's new iPad.

Someone will be caressing its cool glass skin. Flaunting ownership of the most prized techno-bauble since, well, the wondrous iPhone a few years back.

You, like us, may be envious. Tempted to reach for the holy grail. You'll wonder if the machine can live up to the hype.

The technorati, however, aren't grappling with questions that plague ordinary consumers. They're not beset by doubts about whether they really need this sleek new tablet computer.

They're not waiting until the next iteration, with 3G capability. They don't care if their iPhone and iPod Touch and MacBook already do almost as much as, if not more, than this 1.5-pound, 9.7-inch-color-screened aluminum-and-glass wonder. They don't fret about the starting price of $499. Or the absence of a built-in camera or a USB port. Or anything else.

They want it.

They wanted it as soon as Apple chief Steve Jobs introduced it in January. Some probably tried to pull strings and get their hands on it long before the official rollout on Saturday.

Hundreds of thousands of these people have preordered the machine. They're known in marketing parlance as "first adopters."

Hail, intrepid consumers! Your desire for the iPad, stoked by Apple's pitch-perfect marketing, is just what this economy needs. Consumer confidence was recently pegged by the Conference Board at an improving but still abysmal 52.5—that's about 40 points below where it should be in a humming economy.

iPad fever could help turn things around. Nothing like a shiny new machine to jolt Americans back to their natural state of perpetual shopping mania.

Another boost: The first critics' reviews are rolling in, and they are exuberant. Only time—and sales figures—will tell if they are irrationally so. Our guess: You'll have one of these things sooner than you think.

Some critics say the iPad may kill the laptop. That it could revolutionize communications. That it could reveal what happened before the Big Bang.

OK, we made up that last part. But we hope the machine lives up to expectations as the Next Big Thing. Specifically, we hope for a bump in one corner of the media world: the newspaper corner.

We'll be watching to see if newspapers can seize the opportunity—and most important, a chunk of the income stream—from all those people who will read papers that are formatted for Apple's new product. If the iPad begets the iPaper, we'll be very happy.

Jobs has pulled off more than a few amazing feats in his career. Why not one more?