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Since it was unveiled in 2010, a lot of people in the tech press have been perpetrating the myth that the iPad is a "consumtion only" device. As time has moved on, I find this nonsense to become more and more annoying the more I hear it.

I've already ranted on the whole post-PC terminology nonsense before, so I won't be getting into that here. Suffice it to say that the iPad is one of the newer breed of very personal computers, and one that you can really replace your conventional form factor computers with, if you so choose.

It's been quite some time since we got a whole slew of text editors and word processors, so clearly writing is very possible on the iPad. Painting and being artistic in a similar manner to that is also not a problem as there are lots of apps for that too. With the latest model you can both shoot and edit a full-HD video on the same device, as well as publish it to a myriad of different video sharing services. The list goes on… But it's still not a tool for creation, only consumption?

The one thing I'll gladly admit any day of the week that the iPad is not suitable for or particularly good at is spread sheets. Numbers might be fine for a few things, but I guess the Excel junkies out there would tear my head off if I were to be so bold as to say it is enough. But this is pretty much the last bastion of things the iPad is not really all that great at right now. Is this really enough to disquality it as a creation device?

I'm convinced that the Microsoft Surface (when finally released) won't have to suffer the same verbal bashing and we rarely hear people talk about how bad Android tablets are for creation. Both of them are bound to be quite able of doing a whole slew of things, possibly as much as the iPad, or more in some aspects and less in some other aspects. But the iPad is the only one that's only for consumption.

If anything, anyone who actually says the iPad is a mere consumption device it just proves how diconnected from reality they really are. I'd wager a good number of them haven't even tried using the iPad for creative purposes. Heck, I'm sure a fair number of those people haven't even tried an iPad at all. But hey, that makes it all that much easier to keep spewing the same nonsense over and over, not encumbered by that nasty thing called "fact", right?

Can we please let this old hogwash die now?

Author

Robert Falck

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