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Originally Posted by david_e
I haven't decided if I want one or not. Well, actually that's not true. I DO want an iPad Mini, just not the one they're currently selling.
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I agree with you for the most part, especially since the Surface RT seems not to be the full-fledged amputated laptop for which I was hoping.
The iPad Mini is less powerful and not as well spec'd, of course, but even though the first gen seems uninteresting to me
from a distance, more apps specific to my deeper interests do exist for it.
Besides, my momentary disinterest doesn't cancel out the validity of someone else's interest.
Later on, both the Surface RT and the iPad Mini could morph into reasonable alternatives to the best of the current tablets. But I hesitate to write off either one until I've actually used it.
The great strengths of Windows have always been power, control and hardware universality. I'm hoping the SRT will become more powerful, tweakable and inclusive in later iterations.
Even so:
The netbook taught us the importance of the user experience vs. specs. It would be impractical to forget that lesson in the name of another meaningless skirmish in an arbitrary brand war.
Read
Theodor Adorno on the subject of supposedly superior mass-produced objects and the toil of the hobby of luxury (keep in mind he wrote this in the '40s):
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Unfettered technics eliminates luxury, not by declaring privilege as a human right, but by severing the possibility of fulfillment in the midst of raising general living standards. . . . [O]ne cannot shake off the suspicion that even the deviant luxury has an element of something artificial. As per Veblen’s theory, it is more about permitting those who can pay to prove their status than it is about meeting their increasingly undifferentiated needs. While the Cadillac is surely superior to the Chevrolet, since it costs more, this superiority, otherwise than in the old Rolls Royce, is derived from a total plan, which cleverly equips the first with better cylinders, brakes, and accessories, and the second with worse ones -- all without changing anything in the basic schema of the mass product. One need only make small changes in production to transform a Chevrolet into a Cadillac.
Thus, luxury is being hollowed out. For in the middle of general fungibility, happiness clings without exception to what is not fungible. No exertion of humanity, no formal reasoning can alter the fact that the clothing which shimmers like a fairy-tale is worn by the one and only, not by twenty-thousand others.
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