The Next Web runs
down Apple's full presentation and the product highlights, including a
new an iSight camera on the front and a rear camera that runs at 5MP.
Plus "a host of Apple apps were updated
to work with its Retina display, including iWork, iMove and Garage
Band. The new iPad is priced at $499 for 16GB, $599 for 32GB, $699 for
64GB. And $629, $729, and $829 for 4G. It will be available on March
16th in the US." The Verge has a one of those fancy charts where they compare the new iPad against, like the entire National League Central.
Well actually the iPad 2charts, Samsung Galaxy Note, the Asus
Transformer something, and the Nook and the Kindle for good measure.
Gizmodo happened to notice another new feature: a new rainbow colored Apple logo at the end of the presentation. "Put your Apple Kremlinology hat on, folks...Is this Apple's new logo? I hope so! I hope so because:
I love the rainbow. I LOVE DOUBLE RAINBOWS.... It gets me back to my old
Mac years, when all of you didn't know what the hell Apple was." But not
everybody is down with the rainbow connection. At VentureBeat Jolie O'Dell lists the new tie-dye logo as part of a new unraveling of the Apple brand, "a certain sloppiness that was absent from former, Steve Jobs-led launches.
This wasn't anything major, just a few minor but glaring
inconsistencies: Tim Cook going for the 'rumpled executive' look, the
ambiguous naming of the 'new iPad,' the use of a truly horrible pun
["Resolutionary"] on a new product's landing page, and the tie-dyed
Apple logo at the presentation's conclusion.... all of it pointed to a
leadership that either didn't understand or didn't care about
consistency in iconography...Today, we saw the first cracks in what will
eventually become a wholesale break with the past." Huh?
At Buzzfeed an
essayist says she can resist the hype and go without the new iPad: "I
wondered whether people like me felt the same way, so I did an informal
survey of some of my female friends who are all in their early 30s, have
jobs in media, and could afford one if they wanted one. We all have
iPhones; several of us have Kindles. We don't hate technology, or
America, or Apple. But the general consensus was that we mostly don't need one." The Onion has jumped on the bandwagon, though, saying, with a report saying "This Article Generating Thousands Of Dollars In Ad Revenue Simply By Mentioning New iPad."
While
Apple is out on the front lines creating the media devices of the
future, it's good to know some folks are still creating good old
fashioned content. Take Rush Limbaugh - he just has to open his mouth
and there's a week of reaction for us to read, watch and listen to. Says
the L.A. Times' Company Town blog: "The flight of advertisers from The Rush Limbaugh Show continued Wednesday, with a total of 45 national and local companies pulling their spots,
according to the liberal activist groups angered by the talk radio host
for calling Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a 'slut' and a
'prostitute.' Yep. They're not calling him the new Rush. "The current
tally is up to 46 - and 48 if you count the bands who don't want their music played on the show," updates Atlantic Wire. The lib-leaning Media Matters site is tracking who is still advertising on the Limbaugh program. Muses Boing Boing: "I wonder if many Republican politicians are secretly rooting for Limbaugh to receive a Joe McCarthy-style dethroning, because they are scared to death of him?" In a column for Bloomberg, Michael Kinsley starts a backlash-backlash against Limbaugh's opportunistic critics: "The self-righteous parade out the door
by Limbaugh's advertisers is hard to stomach. Had they never listened
to Rush before, in all the years they had been paying for commercials on
his show? His smiling of a barely known law student may be a new low -
even after what he's said about Nancy Pelosi and Michelle Obama - but it's not a huge gap." But at Esquire's The Politics Blog, Charlie Pierce backlashes it one step further: "This is Kinsley being deliberately stupid...We can't do the right thing now because we didn't do the right thing then?"
