The Gizmodo crew has a great take on how Steve Jobs chose to beta test and review his new toy and suggests he should have gone another direction.
We are still waiting for our tester…must have gotten lost in the mail.
How about getting Martha or Rachel Ray or Momofuku’s David Chang to review it with the Epicurious app? Or Ebert in the context of movie watching? Or Oprah on any of her outlets? Or Adam Savage with the amazing digitized periodic table book or some other sciency tool? Or Brad Pitt, with it loaded up with books on architecture? Or Ashton Kutcher with twitter apps? Conan, who has plenty of time, would be perfect, but so would Letterman or Fallon himself. Or Justin Bieber, who seems to be everywhere for no reason? Or Betty White, to inform the rest of the older folks Mossberg doesn’t influence? Or Jayden Smith, son of Will Smith, who’ll be in the Karate Kid? Any of these folks would find outlets, as Steven Fry did, for an early iPad. Or least make tons of short, effective media appearances for it. How about sending it to the lady site Jezebel or NY/Media/mainstream site Gawker.com or Kotaku or io9 or Lifehacker for facets of geekdom that aren’t about the hardware. Because the iPad is hardware, sure, but it’s not about the hardware. And I don’t think Apple wants it to be compared to anything in that category. I’d guess, Apple probably doesn’t need hardware writers anymore—just ones that cover apps.
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