Has Apple reprogrammed your child’s OS?

I recently saw the YouTube clip of the one year old that couldn’t understand that a magazine was not a touchscreen and getting very annoyed that the pages were completely static. For me, books and magazines will never be ‘the same’ on a touchscreen, but will they still have the edge for the next generation?    I want to believe that yes, books will always be magical and not just for nostalgia reasons.  After all, we had Trumpton and then Grange Hill but probably still preferred reading Beatrix Potter and Roald Dahl.  IMHO Harry Potter is far better and most importantly scarier in book form than as a movie.

Steve Jobs knew better than anyone how to appeal to the big kid in all of us and really the iPad is just a grown-up’s toy, that can clearly be used from birth.   With so many apps designed to appeal to children from birth it is not surprising that the iPad spans generations..   So much so that the toy manufacturers have got in on the act and  have launched kids versions (cheaper and probably bouncier) that are apparently going to be big sellers this Christmas. My four year old loves the Angry Birds app, and has somehow learnt how to launch it himself, and my one year old is very excited by the Peekaboo app so I've first-hand experience of the pervasive popularity across all ages of the consumer app.

Steve Jobs knew better than anyone how to appeal to the big kid in all of us and really the iPad is just a grown-up’s toy, that can clearly be used from birth.  However, books and magazines survived the TV generation and I really hope the same applies to the iPad generation. The parent of the baby in the YouTube clip is somebody high up at Orange so maybe it was a very clever bit of PR.  If it was a copy of a touchy feely book such as ‘That’s Not My Monkey’ that the baby was trying to read rather than Marie Claire the toddler would hopefully have been engaged rather than disappointed!