I also don't understand the point of this rant and lecture though history and semantics. The issue addresses an alarming number of reports about and experiences with the new model. Whether it turns out to be prevalent or not, perfectly valid to raise and question. iPads are certainly not cheap and should be scrutinized on every level.
I just absolutely hate the term “creakgate” or any “-gate”.
It’s a personal pet peeve when people label scandals with names ending in -gate. Most of them are nowhere near the significance of Watergate (most are just news cycle filler, which weakens the impact of Watergate if you’re only familiar with the modern usage of -gate), and scandals as significant as Watergate generally don’t need a gate name to secure a place in the news cycle. Plus, as living memory dies and new people are born, history is lost*, and it’s hard to preserve a memory of history, especially near-history**. So Watergate is at risk of being forgotten (except for the broad strokes), certainly the magnitude of the cultural impact is largely already lost***.
And we’ve had two Apple related -gate stories (read non-stories) in as many weeks, just from journalists looking for news cycle filler. I doubt that Apple made significant changes materially to the outer shell of the iPad Air 5, and there’s more discussion of the reports than original reports of these creaks. Plus, the original comment was poorly thought out, calling the M1 “forbidden” and something about “stealing power from the Mac”, which just set me off even more.
* I was on the subway just a week or two ago, and there were two women both accompanied by a young child (well, somewhere between 6 and 12, I’d guess). The apparent mother of one of them mentioned not being able to fly on September 13th and her son asked why that was, which I immediately (correctly) realized referred to the airplane grounding after 9/11. (Ironically, we were on a train line that was damaged in the WTC attack.) It struck me how we’ve now got recent college graduates who were either born after 9/11 or at least have no memory of it, so aspects of what happened that day are in danger of eventually falling out of living memory.
** Near history, especially the relatively mundane day-to-day aspects of life as little as 20 or 30 years ago, are especially easily lost (see YouTube videos about young people who don’t know VHS or even physical media in general). Most history classes don’t cover events that occurred during the instructor’s lifetime, let alone the students’, and, if they do, it’s with very broad strokes. Most kids these days have always lived in a world of social media and have no conception of what came before it (or when social media was a thing you could only access on desktop or laptop computers).
*** I didn’t live through it, and I’ve lived my whole life in a post-Fairness Doctrine world where news sources left and right will quite readily attack the other side’s President. I understand that the office was treated with a certain gravitas by the media before Watergate (though it seems that’s mostly a mass media era thing, ie radio and TV, 19th Century newspapers treated the presidency how cable news does today), so the lack of trust in the presidency that occurred because of Watergate is something I have no direct experience with. While I can rationally study it, I don’t have that firsthand experience of feeling that sudden mistrust, and that feeling is largely lost from living memory.
Edit: I’ve literally heard of people only familiar with the -gate term from modern usage who assumed Watergate had something to do with a minor scandal concerning water, not an office complex named Watergate. So -gate is a bit non-indicative. Mitchell and Webb even have a joke about -gate where they suggest the scandal about Watergate should be called Watergategate because Watergate would be a scandal about water. (And it seems based on the OED’s article on -gate that it was already being used as lazy journalism for news cycle filler less than a year after Watergate broke. Using the gate suffix is therefore like making a hanging chad joke. That’s a 2000 presidential election if you don’t remember. The Simpsons even pointed out how tired of a news story that was in a joke in a 2002 episode that likely entered production and script writing in before 9/11, so it was already tired and dead [and ready for use in a joke about being tired and dead] before 9/11.)
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