Apple's new campaign: iPad is still lovable, kids

Having hastily responded to Samsung's Galaxy 4 launch with an e-mail and Web page about the virtues of the iPhone, Apple is now moved to remind you why the iPad is still magical.

by Chris Matyszczyk

It's always troubling when a salesman looks into the future and tells me that I'm going to love something.

How can he possibly know? It makes me feel so terribly obvious, devoid of secrets and subtlety.

Oddly, Apple has decided to use the opportunity of this weekend to tell me why I'm going to love the iPad.

How does Apple know I don't? Perhaps I dated it for a while and decided it was too short or too demanding or just too beautiful for me?

A new Web campaign for the iPad swoops in after a similar exercise for the iPhone, following the slightly awkward launch of Samsung's Galaxy S4.

In this case, though, there doesn't seem such an obvious occasion. There doesn't appear to be one true rival that is biting iPad's behind like a dog with no conscience.

Still, Cupertino has marshaled a plethora of pulsating points to make you feel this has to be true love.

There's everything from J.D. Power's highest customer satisfaction rating in tablets to the notion that 81 percent of tablet Web traffic comes from the iPad.

There's the vast array of apps, the beauty, the size variants, the speed, the operating system, the cameras, the cloud, and, well, the battery.

There are even the fine men and women in blue T-shirts. They will rescue you, should you inadvertently drop your machine after discovering that your girlfriend is having twins -- with a Pink Floyd cover-band singer from your local bar.

The iPad is one of those products whose owners rarely complain. As this campaign itself says, 95 percent of Fortune 500 companies are either piloting or deploying the iPad.

Yet the more Apple reaches for factual justifications, the more it knows that its real enemy is the incorrigibly infantilized mentality of human beings.

They have an ever-more insatiable desire for something new. For no other reason than just because.

Gadgets are often referred to as toys. Now everyone has come to behave like a child, always wanting something different to play with.

Apple produces relatively few, um, different products. So it's left, in this fickle world, to try and make "great" still feel "new."

It's hardly surprising that the company is associated with so many rumors about a supposed smartwatch.

If Apple produced one, the childlike hordes would surely be excited. It would seem so terribly new.

But would it be great?

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