Opinion

A lot has been said about the iPad over the course of the past year, most of it was pretty negative. To be fair, a lot of stupid, negative stuff has been said about it ever since Steve Jobs unveiled it 5 years ago. Still, something happened last year that changed the overall sentiment of most of the (tech) media.
Ever since, Tim Cook had to endure numerous questions about the “disappointing sales of the iPad” and “where he sees the iPad in the future”. Some have even called the iPad’s entire existence into question.

But how can a device that sold 63.661 million units in 2014 and made 27.8 billion in revenue ever be considered a failure? Remember, if the iPad were its own business, it would still be in the Fortune 150 and be equal in revenue to McDonalds and Macy’s (No. 106 and 107 on Fortunes’ List for 2014). And even if you compare those numbers to the iPhone - 192.662 million units and 120.675 billion in revenue would put it in the Fortune 20 on position 16 right in front of Verizon Wireless and HP - roughly one in three people who bought an iPhone in 2014 also bought an iPad. That’s a huge number!
If that’s how failing looks like, than I’m willing to fail all-day everyday.

Not everything is doom and gloom, though. A few people have voiced their support for the iPad and expressed their continuing love for that marvelous piece of engineering that is the iPad, one of them being MacStories’ Federico Viticci. Granted, he’s a very unique flower - he does almost all of his work on his iPad - but that got me thinking about how people I know use their iPads and how I use it nowadays.

So here it is, my very anecdotal story about the iPad and why I still love it:

In the past few months, a lot has been written about net neutrality. Arguments for and against it, rumors, speeches, discussions. Almost all of them have one thing in common: a basic misunderstanding of how the internet works and where the money flows. Now, I won’t go all-in on the intricate details, but rather give you a broad overview over the way the system is designed. Enough to give you a better understanding of the issue and get you started. We will also discuss why the system is broken right now and, at the end of this article, talk about throttling and why it sometimes isn’t what we expect it to be.

I really love App.net. There, I said it. Just wanted to make that perfectly clear before I dive into this topic.

App.net, or ADN as many like to call it, has been around since August 2012. Initially Mixed Media Labs, the company behind ADN, had launched the service as a Twitter competitor using a Kickstarter campaign to gain traction and collect much needed funds . Their idea: to create a service where the user pays a small fee each month to use the service and with that becomes the real owner of his data. The service doesn’t need to sell its user base to advertisers to keep the lights on (unlike Twitter, Facebook and so many of social networks).

Recently, those initial users/supporters were up for subscription renewal.