Charlie Brooker’s thoughts on the iPad
Two brilliant paragraphs about two of the major missing features in the iPad. First, the missing camera…
Some people are complaining because it doesn’t have a camera in it. Spoiled techno-babies, all of them. Just because something is technically possible, it doesn’t mean it has to be done. It’s technically possible to build an egg whisk that makes phonecalls, an MP3 player that dispenses capers or a car with a bread windscreen. Humankind will continue prosper in their absence. Not everything needs a 15-megapixel lens stuck on the back, like a little glass anus. Give these ingrates a camera and they’d whine that it didn’t have a second camera built into it. What are you taking photographs of anyway? Your camera collection?
And then, “video calls”
And don’t bring up videocalls to defend yourself: it’d be creepy talking to a disembodied two-dimensional head being held at arm’s length, and besides, the iPad is too heavy to hold in front of your face for long, so you’d end up balancing it in your lap, which means both callers would find themselves staring up one another’s others nostrils, like a pair of curious dental patients. (Videocalls are overrated anyway. You just sit there staring at each other with nothing to say. It’s like a prison visit: eventually one of you has to start masturbating just to break the tension.)
I’ve owned a camera equipped computers for over 5 years, and the number of times I have been in a video chat is once, that too with the genius in Goa. And this was not because it was necessary, but more because I wanted to try out iChat’s amazing UI for video chat. I can never imagine myself holding a thin sheet of metal before my face, staring into it and talking to someone. And forget keeping it on your lap. Neither do I intend to hurt my neck terribly while video calling, nor do I want to appear like I’m talking to my crotch.