➤ Bizarro-tech
From the Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet winning Laptop’s 2011 Best Tablet title, to Consumer Reports knocking the iPhone 4S for not having a 3D camera, I can’t help but feel that the tech press is having an identity crisis right now.
Since the beginning, they’ve been people really vested in technology speaking to people with a serious passion for technology. It’s why you can have articles about overclocking and liquid cooling. But once technology became popular culture, and Apple cemented itself as the leader of this new, much larger audience, the tech press didn’t want to acknowledge that there had been any change in the industry.
Basically, they failed to accept that they were nerds-talking-to-nerds up until now. Don’t get me wrong, I’m one of those nerds. But, like a good socialized nerd, I know when to stop talking about SSDs and start talking about cocktails at a party. Most pundits covering tech right now still think this party is the one from 10 years ago, and haven’t learned that the conversation needs to change.
This is why we get ridiculous claims about how specs will kill the iPad in the end, or openness of Android will kill it, or the dozens of other things that are of no interest to the non-nerd audience whose huge influx of spending is what’s driving the profits in this industry today will kill it. Or that anything needs to be killed. It’s the bitterness of the jock walking into the room and stealing all the attention.
This is the sort of thing that the videogame audience has been struggling with over “causal” gaming, but what happened there was that “gamers” self-identified as the hardcore, and as a powerful niche with purchasing power that shouldn’t be ignored. And as a result, Sony has appeared to move away from their previous digital-lifestyle approach of the PSP to a more hardcore package with the PS Vita. Again, not ignoring the casual market with other PlayStation-branded initiatives, but accepting that the gamer market is different.
What’s missing right now from most of these pundits is that acceptance of being part of the hardcore, and not needing to (or even being the best people to) speak for the broader audiences’ interests.
