There’s a story going around about how a 1-year old just can’t figure out a magazine, despite being able to work out how to use an iPad: 1-Year-Old Plays With Magazine Like It’s An iPad.
What’s amazing about this story is people gushing about how this further shows Steve Jobs’ genius or how he has “coded a part of [this child]’s OS” (comments on mashable, above). Wow, how amazing is the iPad that it’s easier to understand for a baby than a physical magazine?
This is ridiculous. Let’s stop and think for a minute. Children do not know very much about the physical world. If you give them an iPad and they play with it, they “learn” that touching the screen makes things move. Give them a magazine, of course, they’re going to think they can move the pictures around. They are experimenting and trying to learn how things work.
Surely, if you gave this baby a magazine first and one day gave them an iPad, it would seem odd to them that they can do things on an iPad they can’t do on a magazine. This has nothing to do with the intuitiveness of an iPad versus a magazine, or how magazines are somehow inferior, or how Jobs was a genius.
Seriously, yes, Steve Jobs was an amazing influence on computing and Apple makes great things, but enough with the gushing, as if you’ve just discovered you’re related to him and you need to share his genius with the world.