Snippet: The Verge Doesn’t Work ☇

With the lead-up to Thanksgiving and travel, I missed that The Verge’s Tom Warren tweeted some rather incendiary comments that seem to reflect his site’s attitude towards a lot of things:

Nilay [Patel] made this point on Vergecast, but the people who have replaced their laptops with an iPad are people who do fuck all work. The rest of us hard working people use a laptop, because we have real stuff to do other than send emails and fart around. Don’t @ me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What an out-of-touch statement to make while representing a site that supposedly celebrates all technology, not just traditional laptops. I had plenty of reactionary thoughts because I understand that what works for me may not necessarily work for others, but Ben Brooks beat me to it and weighed in perfectly:

It’s disrespectful to tell someone that because they use an iPad instead of a laptop, they don’t do real work. The only caveat I’ll offer is it’s fine to tell someone this if they are a certified billionaire who actually just sits around all day doing nothing. Otherwise, the tech media at large needs to get over their ego and stop looking at new devices as a threat to devices they have loved, and instead see them as opportunity for creating better tools. Lets call that “optimism”, you can google that later.

In other words, we should all be rooting fo the iPad to succeed because if you really wiped the slate clean, the ideal tool is closer to an iPad than it is to a laptop. And I do believe we all want the ideal tools.

Even though this is a small site and traffic I refer elsewhere probably doesn’t even move the needle, I’m finding it harder and harder to link to The Verge for general tech news stories.