The Obligatory iPad Mini Post

Look, I don’t hide the fact that I’m pretty deeply invested in the Apple ecosystem. That started years ago when I got serious about Pro Audio. Of course the landscape has changed dramatically since then. While Apple was the choice of creative professionals back in the 90′s, they’ve become the biggest consumer focused electronics company on the planet. There’s a downside to that… which I’ll save for another day.

Today belongs to the iPad mini.

I mean, sure, Apple announced a whole slate of new hardware. All of it thinner and lighter than the generation before. They even broke out a new 4th Gen regular iPad, just six months after the 3rd gen. This has some people gripping about how their iPad 3′s are now pieces of crap. More fodder for Saturday Night Live’s snark on tech snark, I guess.

Which actually brings me to the meat of our obligatory post: just how much of a technological marvel the new Mini is. And before you start screaming FANBOY at me let it be known that I think all these devices: the Kindle Fires and the Galaxy III’s are marvels. We’re living in an age of marvels.

What we aren’t living in is an age of apparent marvels.

As I was following the live blogging of the Mini announcement I sort of freaked out about how thin this thing is. How light. I mean: the same weight as a legal pad? I remember when I first picked up an iPhone 5 the other day. It made my iPhone 4 feel like a lead brick. How much thinner and lighter can these things get?

When will we be impressed by this junk again?

Because right now the whole of the tech press seems to be so freaking jaded. Perhaps it’s a symptom of identifying more with the designers than they do with the consumers of technology. So many people engage in criticism and coverage of a topic out of a desire to be directly involved in the creation of what they are interested in. Goddard was a film critic before he was a film maker, for one.

I think, though, that we will not see the tech press have a full on freakout about a new piece of gear– from Apple at least– until the designers manage to do something they thought was only possible in science fiction. Like an iPad you can fold up and put in your pocket as if it were paper. Contact lenses with the augmented reality powers of Google Glass and the brains of a fully functional Siri. Edible video game tablets that cause full sensory hallucinations.

In the meanwhile we only have this paltry age of wonders to keep us entertained.

Boo hoo.