Category: iPad

Apple is hastily trying to respond to a serious iPad flaw that has only now come to light after customers have been using the device for several weeks. The company’s support forums are rife with complaints about the iPad’s deleterious effects, including one from Ryan McCloskey of Dayton, Ohio.

“I was sitting down on the couch to watch Netflix on the iPad,” McCloskey said. “And I noticed these scuff marks on the coffee table… right where I was going to put my feet.”

According to McCloskey, the optimal ergonomics in his home for the iPad involve him sitting in a slouched position on his couch with his feet propped up on the coffee table and the iPad resting on his thighs, using the “false boner” created by his jeans as a stand. And since acquiring his iPad, McCloskey says, he’s been sitting like this so much he’s destroyed an heirloom coffee table that’s been in his family since 1985.

From Anchorage to Key West, from San Diego to Bar Harbor, this position has widely been confirmed as the most optimal by iPad owners who have used the device for more than a week.

The result is a rash of scuffed and scraped coffee tables across a nation where sitting down around the coffee table to enjoy beer, board games and electronic devices (but, ironically, not coffee) has long been considered not really a national pastime per se, but some kind of more ill-defined national activity of unspecified frequency and duration.

The devastating coffee table Armageddon inflicted by the iPad has, of course, prompted the predictable lawsuit.

“Apple’s astounding disregard for the damage the iPad has done to its customers’ furniture is reprehensible,” said attorney Rhys Shea. “Even the company’s own marketing materials negligently suggest customers prop their feet up on their coffee tables to the detriment of their finish and structural integrity.”

“The members of my firm’s class action suit against the company will not be satisfied until they have their entire living room sets replace,” Shea said.

“Because all the pieces match, you know. You can’t just replace the coffee table. You have to replace the cabinet and the side table… the whole living room set.”

Apart from the class action, a group of concerned parents has formed to protest the iPad. The group claims that the kind of relaxed sitting position the iPad elicits — one that parents have been telling their children not to do for decades, if not millennia — will incite disobedience, sloth and immoral behavior.

Spokesperson Maureen Crimp said “I’ve seen the data. The correlation between sitting in a slouched position with your feet on the furniture and the kind of depraved activities that are tearing our society apart — masturbation, driving over the speed limit, premarital sex and watching ‘Glee’ — is almost 1:1.”

Not one to miss an opportunity, Griffin Technology announced today the $49.95 Sole Soother for iPad, a revolutionary protective covering for tables and other surfaces. The Sole Soother will be available in July in leather, neoprene, and microsuede fabrics and include an integrated 30-pin dock connector for charging and mounting the iPad when not in use.

Apple, despite being described as trying to hastily respond, did not respond to requests for comment.

While most took the recent story of Victoria Campbell, the 99-year old whose first computer is an iPad, as a heartwarming tale of the benefits of technology, one pundit saw the insidious effects of Apple’s closed and DRM-ridden platform.

Open source and digital rights advocate Cory Doctorow — author of not one but two screeds detailing why anyone who buys an iPad is a terrible, terrible person — flew to Lake Oswego, Ore. to personally chastise Campbell.

“Apparently Ms. Campbell is happy inside Apple’s walled garden,” Doctorow said after being ejected from the Mary’s Woods Retirement Community for haranguing the nonagenarian for a full 45 minutes on the moral imperative of open systems, digital rights and steampunk subculture.

“I hope she’s happy in the infantile world of apps only approved by Apple’s jack-booted thugs,” the author of Little Brother said. “I hope she’s happy being forced into being a content consumer instead of a content creator. And when I say ‘I hope she’s happy’ I’m being sarcastic because people like Campbell really are the worst people in the world. And that includes pedophiles.”

Doctorow believes Campbell should avail herself of any one of the numerous open systems that are just as good, just as easy to use and have just as much content as the iPad.

“I explained to her how easy it is to compile and install Debian on a steampunk casemod of a tablet built by a Japanese company I know of that’s run entirely by bloody nurse cosplayers. You have to reset some jumpers and the sound card isn’t compatible yet, but you can run GIMP on it. Try that on an iPad.

“Anyway, she pretended not to understand what I was talking about. Way to buy into the ugly stereotype of the technophobic nonagenarian with glaucoma in a nursing home, Ms. Campbell.”

The staff of Mary’s Woods was beside themselves.

“This is just awful,” said director Patricia Hershey. “We’re not sure exactly how he got in. We think he might have crawled in through a heating duct that’s only a foot and half across. Although he would have had to dislocate his shoulder in order to fit in it.”

Hershey shuddered. “The staff and the residents are all terribly frightened and confused.”

Doctorow, who will be signing copies of Little Brother at the Bloomington Linux Users Group next week, was unapologetic about his methods.

“Digital rights is the most important thing ever,” Doctorow said flatly. “Way more important than cancer or genocide or child slavery. It’s not even close. They’re like way down on the graph.

“If you are not part of the solution — which is open systems using standards-based formats that allow everyone to freely create and consume openly licensed content while wearing brass-rimmed goggles, leather dusters, tightly-laced bodices and gauntlets — then you’re part of the problem. And Virginia Campbell is part of the problem.”

Hershey said that the incident has forced her to rescind her invitation to have Doctorow conduct a dramatic reading of Little Brother next month to the residents.

“That’s just typical of an organization that promotes closed systems,” Doctorow noted, slipping a copy of Little Brother into the basket of a Mary’s Woods resident’s mobility scooter as she left the facility.

Campbell and Hershey have declined to press charges against Doctorow, stating they don’t think they could bear to listen to him testify.

“I already heard him testify for 45 of the longest minutes of my 99-year life,” Campbell said, not looking up from the poem she was inexplicably creating on her closed, proprietary and DRM-ridden iPad. “That was more than enough for me.”

[Crazy Apple Rumors Site is satire. Added for the irony-impaired who are apparently sending hate mail to Cory over this piece. Seriously, people. Sometimes I don’t know what the hell to do with you.]