Buying a Touchpad

When I was younger I would have been following the news of HP’s announcement abandoning their Touchpad tablet closely in order to find a deal. I would never have missed the resulting fire sale and would have scoured the web and local stores in order to participate. Plagiarizing a too-often-utilized phrase, I’m too old for that stuff. Part of me kind of regrets sleeping through the opportunity, as all I want in a tablet is WiFi, an adequate browser, document viewing and editing, e-book viewing, music playing and XVID type AVI video playing, all of which can be achieved relatively cheaply with the Touchpad. Every once in a while I troll HP’s website to check if the supposed final batch has been released for sale to no avail so far.

Recently I read some of the comments on the site out of boredom and was struck by how whiny a lot of them were, some begging HP for a place in line to buy one, others jealous and acting out against those with them and decrying imagined “unfairness” of HP in not having enough stock to satisfy demand. In my mind I find a correlation between these whiners and those participating in the current Wall Street protests. Just like the Wall Street protestors very likely have no idea what it is exactly Wall Street really is and couldn’t explain anything that it does or why, sudden Touchpad fans don’t understand why it is that they went on sale at such a discounted rate. It wasn’t because HP reduced the price in order to capture more market share. It was because they wanted to get out of the market, and quick. No one should have been surprised by the sudden popularity. Tablets are a popular and costly item now and discounting by 80%, selling at a point no reasonable person could think HP did anything other than lose money at, will move a lot of stock. Missing the opportunity may sting, but that’s the way things go sometimes. Ask anyone on a Southwest flight stuck with a C boarding pass. Could of, would of, should of, didn’t