Apple's Gizmo of the Future and the Rush from Rush

"Here she is - the iPad HD! Er, new iPad," says Engadget. Right! Wait - what? Yes, the new iPad is not being called the iPad 3 but just the new iPad. You know, like they did for the New Testament. "Breaking away from the numerical tracking system used before (and still used in the iPhone range), Apple has decided to highlight the most major change in its newest slate by simply dubbing it 'new.' " Everybody cheer on the count of three: One. Two. Yay. Three. Couldn't hold it in! The denumbering aside, "unsurprisingly, Apple has managed to produce something that's truly beautiful to look at," Engadget adds. Slate Moneybox says Apple is gunning for the PC market with the new iPad, introduced on Wednesday with most of the features experts predicted: a super high-res retina display, quad-core graphics, speedy 4G LTE networking. "The way they presented it, it's not that there's a 'tablet' market dominated by the iPad. Instead, there's a PC market in which...steady incremental improvements to the iPad's capabilities turn it into a potential PC replacement. The more powerful chips mean that more sophisticated apps can reside on the iPad. The rollout of iCloud is supposed to render the iPad's limited storage capacity less relevant..."

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?"