It’s enjoyable to see an ad that is 100% wrong. I’m not single, I’m not over 40, and I don’t live in Chicago.

Much has been said about the iPad’s large display, attractive design, and custom silicon. These features are well known and well documented. However, there is another element to the iPad that has yet to be thoroughly explored.

Until now.

“We had suspected that there was a significant gain in this area,” said Dr. E. Gobost, “but it wasn’t until we ran the actual tests that we realized exactly how significant Apple’s achievement was.”

“We feel the boost is due in part to the large Apple logo on the back of the iPad,” he continued. “The Apple logo on the iPhone was depressingly small, and was often covered by the user’s hand. This made it harder to show off the fact that you were using a top-of-the-line Apple product, and thus reduced the pretentiousness of the device. Apple has completely solved that in the design of the iPad.”

“It’s true,” verified Abus Ryder, iPad owner and pretentious snob. “With my iPod touch I had be really obvious that I was using a multi-touch device to properly impress the other passengers on my commute to work every day. Now the big glossy Apple logo lets everyone know that even though I’m riding the bus to work, It’s not because I’m a bad . It’s because I’m choosing to do so, you know, for the environment. So it’s a double score for me! Score! Score!”

“The iPad was designed to improve owners’ lives by being an excellent touch screen computer that allows you to effortlessly do all the things you love without being tied to a desk or a keyboard,” said a faceless Apple PR spokesperson¹ . “Any increase in ego or pretentiousness is merely a side effect of owning a well-designed device, and wasn’t included by design.”

Dr. Gobost finds this hard to believe.

“I find that hard to believe. I mean look at these numbers,” he said, opening a Numbers Spreadsheet on his iPad and showing us a graph. He then decided that the graph wasn’t pretty enough in Numbers and re-created it in Keynote. “See how easy that was? That kind of simple, swipe-tap-drag simplicity is just for making life more fun for users. Tap! Swipe! Double-tap! Two-finger-tap! Done! That’s pure showmanship, friends.” Gobost did not explain the measurements used in his chart, other than to note that the values were in “SPUs”² .

He may just have a point.

“He may have a point,” conceded Punny Name, a person. “With the iMac, or the Power Mac, or even the Mac mini you have to get the person to come to your actual desk to show off your Apple awesomeness. The MacBook Pros are portable, sure, but hard to really show off in settings like the bus, the train, or standing in line at a fashionable whole foods store. The iPhones and iPods are easy to use anywhere, but showing them off is a challenge. Apple has finally hit that sweet spot: Big enough to show off, small enough to show off anywhere.”

1. It was really creepy. I had to look away [↩]
2. Standard Pretentiousness Units [↩]

So, after staining in line for an hour in the cold mountain air, I got my iPad and have come to some completely un-startling conclusions:

- The iPad is pretty big.
- It really is very fast, which shouldn’t be a surprise, because everything it’s running was designed for it.
- The multitouch and the keyboard are fine. I’m typing this on the new WordPad app for iPad.
- People who just dropped hundreds of dollars for a device rarely complain about said device.
- Stephen Fry was right: Douglas Adams would have loved this thing.

Every Friday week so often we publish a list of inFrequently Answered Questions and answers to help you, the Crazy Apple user, get more out of your Crazy Apple products.

This week we cover Pandora|One, the music service that

This Just In!

Q: Wait, so I get preempted before I get so much as one line? What gives?

Breaking News!

Q: I guess so.

The Crazy Apple News Site’s top News Analyst & Team Enthusiast (“NATE”) is being sent by their top secret employer to some top-secret training (the training is so secret that it requires a hyphen!)

In Mountain. View. California.

Q: So? What’s so special about Mountain View?

Home of Google, only seven minutes from 1 Infinite Loop, it’s like finally going to MacWorld or WWDC, only without all the other people there or anything remotely Apple-related going on. Stay tuned for some Crazy On The Road posts soon!

Q: And it’s not even a long post, either. Really? Really? That’s all we get?

We would normally return you to our iFAQ already in progress at this point, but we’re too excited. Also this week’s “Q” is kind of a jerk.

Q: Oh, now that’s just cold.

• March 15, 2010: People finally get tired of calling the iPad “basically a big iPod Touch”
• March 16, 2010: The wave of iPad-sounds-like-maxi-pad jokes fails to slow down at all, sadly.
• April 7, 2010: iPad app sales outpace the sales of all apps on the Android Marketplace ever.
• April 8, 2010: The ill-conceived ZunePad is announced
• April 9, 2010: In a move that earns the respect of Mafiosos everywhere, Microsoft attempts to whack every journalist who covered the ZunePad launch event, hoping to be able to deny they ever dreamed of such a thing.
• May 21, 2010: Apple announces the code name for OSX 10.7; not in a conference, nor in a webcast, but via email to John Gruber and David Pogue. Industry pundits suspect the new name heralds an overall shift to the new iPad when the name is revealed to be “Some kind of cat or something”
• May 4, 2010: Lazarus Long buys an iPad.
• July 24, 2010: Pro-Windows bloggers are forced to admit that, despite its shortcomings, the iPad “seems to be doing okay” as Apple celebrates the sale of the 10 Millionth unit.
• July 25, 2010: Apple announces the iPad 2nd Gen, with all the features everyone wanted in the 1st Gen for $100 less.
• July 26, 2010: 10 million 1st Gen iPads are available on eBay.
• July 27, 2010: iPad OS 4.0 is released to developers so they can write apps for the new 2nd Gen iPad. 4 million copies of the SDK are downloaded, resulting in 10000 new apps released to the iPad App Store, 5000 rejections, and an estimated 6 Million “Hello World” apps worldwide.
• September 21, 2010: The 2nd Gen iPad is released. People who have been standing in line since July find that they no longer have the ability to walk.
• November 3, 2010: Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Paul Therrott , all dressed in black trench coats with the collars turned up and sporting dark glasses and fedoras, each buy an iPad from the Apple store in cash. A suspicious mall employee presses the silent alarm and the three are apprehended and taken in for questioning. They  found to be perfectly innocent, albeit perfectly innocent owners of iPads. Apple bloggers are unable to breathe for a good twenty minutes after seeing this story on Twitter.
• December 25th, 2010: Millions receive iPads for Christmas. Dozens receive whatever terrible tablet thing HP is pushing, and immediately list them on eBay.
• January 10, 2011: Apple announces a user base of 20 million iPads, and the new iPad 3rd Gen with all the features everybody wanted in the second gen. 20 million iPads are listed on eBay.

Crazy Apple News posts start again on Monday!  Thank you all for your support! It means a lot to me.

-Nate Dickson

Week one got off to a good start when I was able to clear my school schedule all the way until November 12 by the simple expedient of doing my homework early. Things got a little rougher later on in the week, however, when everyone in my house got very sick. Twice.  Then there was a football game at which I had to work.  And today, MacHeist announced a free bundle.  So that’s awesome. Go check out the six free products, and give me a suggestion about which one I should write about in the first week of December.

If you need a more immediate fix, download Hordes of Orcs, then re-read this classic iFAQ written by Grug the Orc from Hordes of Orcs.

Okay, back into the breach!