A Very Early Adopter

The latest YouTube sensation is this 2-year-old’s unhesitating gleeful dive into the world of the Apple iPad:

You know, I’d like to get all stiff-backed and righteous about this (shouldn’t that kid be playing outside?), but I just can’t. I think it’s wonderful. I first messed with a computer at age 5 or 6, when such machines were clumsy and alien beasts, our first home computer arrived about five years after that, and I’ve never been away from one since. They’re as basic as books–increasingly, they are books, for all practical purposes–and my child will consistently have a lot of access to both the paper kind and the glowy kind.

And yes, I am a confessed Apple chauvinist, after quite a few years spent in the Microsoft wilderness. This 2-year-old has figured out how to use an iPad for a reason: Apple’s Tufte-inclined designers have spent years refining the interface, not just to make it simple but to make it responsive to the way we think and act. That is not a technocratic approach. It is a humanist one, and unless you’re truly an off-the-grid guy, I can’t understand the weary Apple-bashing that I heard all last week. If these people got their mitts on every piece of electronics in our house–let’s say the convoluted push-button interface on the microwave oven, or the incomprehensibly marked apartment-building intercom–our lives would run a lot more smoothly.