Though we tend to associate orgiastic bursts of consumer madness with the release of an Apple product, these past few days, we saw one swirl around a rather surprising pivot: Hewlett Packard’s Touchpad tablet. Though a week ago most people would only faintly recall the Touchpad from those bizarre Russell Brand commercials, a frenzy erupted around the device this past weekend. When HP announced on Thursday they were discontinuing the tablet a scant six weeks after its release, retailers reacted quickly, and the $449 machine was discounted to a cool 99 bucks. To put it mildly, people then went a bit nuts. On Toronto-based bargain hunting site RedFlagDeals, a thread dedicated to finding a Touchpad popped up and generated so much activity, it had ballooned to around 10,000 posts and a million and a half views in under four days. Twitter and Facebook lit up with the pros and cons of buying the tablet, and tips on where to find one rolled in by the thousand. Frenzy is not too strong a word. The reasons are mostly obvious. When a relatively new piece of technology in limited supply becomes very cheap, people scramble to get theirs. Not only is product discounted 80 percent a clear victory in the modern sport of bargain hunting, people also want to be a part of the contemporary moment, and few things scream ‘today’ like a touchscreen tablet. Beyond the obvious price factor, however, what was also interesting was listening to bargain hunters’ reasoning for buying the obsolete tablet: ‘I’ll get one for the kids’, or ‘it’ll be nice to have one for the kitchen or for the cottage.’ Put another way, it was a glimpse into what happens when the tablet becomes an everyday commodity. When the iPad first appeared, many were understandably sceptical. It was seemed to be a $500 device that did most things a computer did, and did most of them less effectively. But once they got into people’s hands, it quickly became clear that the tablet was not so much about strict functionality – of whether it ran Flash websites or if it was good for typing – as it was about how it fit into one’s life. It was the internet and one’s media in the instant-on format of a book, a thing you could carry from room to room that also happened to grant easy access to half the world’s information. It was the thing you use in the kitchen for recipes, at the breakfast table for reading the news or in bed to watch to a movie – assuming, of course, you had hundreds of dollars lying around. Whether or not it’s technically good value, the iPad is still seriously expensive. So it’s not so much that the discount of the HP tablet was a strange anomaly as it was foreshadowing. When the simple, plain internet device is a cheap commodity, those little windows onto the web will be everywhere. And the commoditization of the tablet won’t just be about sweeping, broad ideas – the new form of a book or the democratization of knowledge – but about tiny, everyday things: to-do lists that don’t get lost, TV listings that are always accurate or cookbooks that are always full of new recipes. It’s that combination of portability and ease that will truly ‘internet-ize’ our lives. So if the rush for the Touchpad was mostly about gadget and bargain lust, it was also about another kind of desire: for a world full of simple screens and, for better or worse, a generation constantly attached to them.
