It’s an iPad

Apple’s figured out religion. Steve Jobs stands on a stage in his black turtleneck and speaks vaguely about changing everything, and it spreads through tech forums and Twitter like a virus that makes people give you money instead of making you sick. The remarkable thing is how little he actually has to say. What he doesn’t say works harder than what he does.

The iPad announcement had been building for weeks. Every forum full of guesses. Jobs hyped it as the most important thing he’d ever made, which could mean anything, but it didn’t matter because people had already committed to wanting it before they saw it.

Then he showed them: something between an iPhone and a MacBook, thin and minimal. You can draw with your fingers, read books, watch videos, flip through magazines, listen to music. Or watch porn for ten hours straight—whatever you want. The point is you can do it with your hands, and that feels better than it sounds. The price landed where Apple always prices things—expensive enough to hurt, not expensive enough to make you pause.

I’m genuinely impressed. Apple’s good at making you want nice things, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Their design sense is refined enough that using anything else feels clunky and desperate by comparison. And sure, people will camp outside stores for this. People will refresh the Apple website obsessively. Some of them will convince themselves they need it; most of them just want it, and that’s honest enough.

The devotion does border on irrational—people would literally infect themselves with swine flu just to own one, or so the joke went. But irrationality in service of genuine craft and taste isn’t the worst thing. Steve Jobs has figured out how to make people want things not through manipulation but through just making something so clean and elegant that you’d be stupid not to want it.

I’m probably going to buy one. I know exactly what I’m doing when I do.