I just got an iPad for trying things out at work. I’m excited about it, especially as a web client. But the out-of-box experience is pretty lousy. I’m surprised I haven’t seen others talking about this. It’s been over half an hour, and I’m still not actually using the thing!
First off, I opened the box, unwrapped the iPad, and pressed the Home button. What happens? The screen shows a sync cable and says “iTunes”. Then I looked at the instructions in the box, and find out that before the thing can do anything at all, I have to sync it with iTunes. Which is ridiculous. Hasn’t Apple ever heard of the cloud?
So I download iTunes. All 93.8MB, taking about 15 minutes. (My home Internet connection is much faster than that; I guess Apple’s bandwidth is swamped.) Of course, to download it I had to check that I agreed to all the terms and conditions.
Okay, now to install it. I have to agree to more terms and conditions to do that, but finally it installs. Even though I downloaded the 64 bit version, the installer says it’s going to install into Program Files (x86), where 32 bit programs go. instead of Program Files. And though it installed something in the right location for 64 bit programs, it put a lot of stuff in the 32 bit directory.
Finally, iTunes is installed and running. I’ve got to sign in to my (existing) iTunes account, requiring me to agree to still more terms and conditions. Now I can finally connect the sync cable.
Hooray! The iPad wakes up, I can run the web browser (which nicely prompts me to connect to my home network, pretty easily) and I’m off. So now I’m off to the AppStore on the iPad to get the Kindle and Netflix apps. But first I’m prompted to download the iBooks application, which I agree to. It starts downloading, I search for Kindle and get it started, then search for Netflix.
At which point I’m prompted to agree to new terms and conditions for the iTunes store. I’m now on panel 1 of 58 of those new terms and conditions.
Oh, well. Eventually I’ll probably be able to use this new gizmo. I just had to drop a note here about the tremendous failure Apple has here. This is really ridiculous; nobody but Apple could get away with it.
Charles Engelke's Blog 