Ruining the iPad

Rene Ritchie

🚀 Visit https://www.brilliant.org/reneritchie to start learning STEM for FREE! First 200 get 20% off their annual premium subscription!

A friend of the family asked me to look at their iPad recently because something wasn’t working right and I noticed they had like 30 instances of the Mail all over the place. I’m exaggerating, of course, but this is a person who’s super smart, taught at university, but just never got computers never understood them. Avoided command lines entirely, struggled with graphical interfaces, but when the iPad came out, that was it, the perfect computer for them. Finally.

Something simple. Intuitive. Full screen. Focused.

But year after every couple or few years, layers and layers of capabilities have been added, but with complexities to match, and many of the same problems they had with graphical interfaces, the ones the iPad initially solved for them, are coming back. With a hefty helping of near-constant gesture collisions on top.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.