How can you be so stupid?

Aside from obvious inaccuracies and stupidity, this image I saw on Reddit made me sad. People keep putting down the iPad because of its specs. Yes, a netbook has more processing power and can run a conventional operating system. Sure, a Tablet PC has a stylus and hardware keyboard that the iPad doesn’t have. Fine, Dell makes laptops for the same price that do anything you can think of using a computer for. And it doesn’t matter a damn!

Most of the people complaining are nerds (well, they all are by most definitions of the term these days). They’re engineers, system administrators and programmers. These people can take a Eee PC and, by spending ungodly amounts of time tweaking and learning and configuring, turn it into a dream system that radiates cancer-killing WiFi signals and can cure world hunger by replicating toast in the DVD drive. No, these people will complain about lack of features, or locked-down application development, or DRM, or poor graphics, or whatever affects them, because it really does affect them. Those little things make the product less fun to play with and tweak and customize.

The other 95% of the population will say “Okay, you go have hours of fun setting that thing up, I’ll just buy this iPad and watch some TV on it now.”

The concepts of the iPad and iPhone UI are dead simple. Rows of buttons. The one that says “video” lets you play video. The one that says “settings” lets you change settings. The one that says “phone” lets you… see what I’m getting at?

Let’s go through the typical process of a nerd guiding an inexperienced user to play a TV show on Windows 7.

1. “Open Explorer. No, not Internet Explorer, the file folders icon that’s next to the blue marble in the bottom left corner.” This is simple stuff! How can this guy be so stupid?
2. “OK, now find the video you want to play. OK, let’s look in the downloads folder. You know how to get to that folder, right? No?” sigh “Alright, go to Explorer. Yes, that icon. OK, you see the Downloads folder? In the sidebar, not the main content area, that’s your Library. OK… why isn’t it there? Uh, hit the back button. Big blue left arrow at the top of the window. Alright, open up Documents. Ah, there’s another downloads folder there. Click on that… there it is!” Wow, this guy can’t remember where he put his videos? How can this guy be so stupid?
3. “Doubleclick on the file. OK, Windows Media Player is coming up. No, don’t hit Express Settings, do you want to send all this information to Microsoft? Thought so. OK, hit next… OK, we’ll have to make sure that this opens video files but not music files…” Guy sighs as he sees you pressing buttons seemingly arbitrarily without an explanation that makes sense. “Alright, now we can play the video!” Windows has been around for more than 20 years and he still doesn’t get it? How can this guy be so stupid?

Easy as 1-2-3, right? Here’s what it is on the iPhone:

1. Tap that Video icon.
2. See the TV show? Tap that and then tap the individual episode you want to watch.

No, most heavy computer users won’t think twice about using a video on a computer, because a combination of stubborn curiosity and infinite man-hours of trial and error have drilled into their skulls a complete schematic of how to do everything on a computer. For everyone else, they most likely would have dropped a DVD into their DVD player halfway through the first step of playing it on the PC. Yet, they are ridiculed because they now have the chance to buy a computer that they can understand, and that nerds don’t want to understand.

I wouldn’t be surprised if these people were buying iPads just to beat the living daylights out of the nerds who criticized them.