Jobs shines Reality Distortion Field on iPad2
p2pnet view Advertising:- “Watch Apple unveil iPad 2 at a special event on March 2, 2011, in San Francisco”, says the caption to the video at the end of this, going on, “iPad 2 is thinner, lighter, and faster with two cameras for FaceTime video calls and HD video recording. Yet it still has the same 10-hour battery life.”
wowee.
But also consider the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field, suggests Seth Weintraub in Fortune.
“Apple twisted facts and used an erroneous quotation to try to convince crowds that all other tablets had no shot at de-throning the iPad in 2011″, he says.
Examples?
Says the story >>>
As part of the opening iPad bullet points, Apple included this gem: “First dual core tablet to ship in volume.” That’s funny, I tested a Dell (DELL) Streak 7, which had a dual core Nvidia Tegra 2 chip in January. They’ve been shipping ever since on T-Mobile.
In volume.
Of course, the Motorola (MMI) XOOM also has this same dual core processor and is certainly shipping in volume as well. In fact, I’ve been using an Android phone (the Atrix) with a dual core chip for weeks and it wasn’t the first to ship in volume. As for Apple (AAPL), they haven’t shipped one iPad 2 yet — iPad 2′s hit shelves on March 11.
Perhaps this has to do with Jobs’ subjective view of ‘Volume’ which may start at whatever numbers iPads are currently selling? And ‘ship’? Well, I don’t know.
That was just the beginning. He next pulled out a thoroughly debunked, mis-translated quote from a Samsung VP:
To wit, “As you heard, our sell-in was quite aggressive … Around 2 million. In terms of sell-out, we believe it was quite small.” Samsung VP Lee Young-hee. However, >>>
Some people only hear what they want to hear, but that quote should have ended with “quite smooth.” That translation was officially corrected a long time ago … Shame on Apple Keynote fact-checkers, if such a role even exists.
And there’s lots more.
For those among you who aren’t familiar with the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field, here’s the first post on it, from Andy Hertzfeld on Folklore, dating back to 1981 »»»
I officially started on the Mac project on a Thursday afternoon, and Bud Tribble, my new manager and the only other software person on the project, was out of town. Bud was on leave of absence from an M.D.-Ph.D. program and he had to occasionally return to Seattle to keep up his standing in the program.
Bud usually didn’t come into work until after lunch, so I met with him for the first time the following Monday afternoon. We started talking about all the work that had to be done, which was pretty overwhelming. He showed me the official schedule for developing the software that had us shipping in about ten months, in early January 1982.
“Bud, that’s crazy!”, I told him. “We’ve hardly even started yet. There’s no way we can get it done by then.”
“I know,” he responded, in a low voice, almost a whisper.
“You know? If you know the schedule is off-base, why don’t you correct it?”
“Well, it’s Steve. Steve insists that we’re shipping in early 1982, and won’t accept answers to the contrary. The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a reality distortion field.”
“A what?”
“A reality distortion field. In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he’s not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules. And there’s a couple of other things you should know about working with Steve.”
“What else?”
“Well, just because he tells you that something is awful or great, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll feel that way tomorrow. You have to low-pass filter his input. And then, he’s really funny about ideas. If you tell him a new idea, he’ll usually tell you that he thinks it’s stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, he’ll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it.”
I thought Bud was surely exaggerating, until I observed Steve in action over the next few weeks. The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently.
Amazingly, the reality distortion field seemed to be effective even if you were acutely aware of it, although the effects would fade after Steve departed. We would often discuss potential techniques for grounding it (see Are You Gonna Do It?) , but after a while most of us gave up, accepting it as a force of nature.
Now you know 
[Picture with apologies to Albert Watson. His original photo is on Business Pundit.]
Fortune – Steve Jobs’ reality distortion takes its toll on truth, March 3, 2011
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
World War III will be a global information war with no division between civilian & military participation ~ Marshall McLuhan
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. Subscribe to p2pnet.net | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/feed
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
March 4th, 2011 at 11:41 am
Get with the times.
It’s called an iRealityDistortionField, or iRDF for short.