Poor old PC: The humble desktop gets a kicking today from the UK government’s chief operating officer, Stephen Kelly. Apparently his state-issue computer takes seven minutes to boot. That tots up to thee days a year the average government employee wastes staring at a blank screen. I imagined Mr. Kelly fettling an ancient Windows XP computer stuffed with loads of unwanted startups and a dodgy old disk. Not so, it seems. This slothful desktop costs £6,000. You would have thought that for six grand he could have bought something that would boot quicker than that.
All this was a justification for suggesting that instead of spending £6,000 on a clunky old PC, the government would save “enough to buy 10 iPads.” Sounds like a good plan to me. Chipping in, the Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude, said that £2.2 billion of savings had come from cutting the number of central government workers. But money had also been saved by “getting smarter, savvier and more innovative”. That, presumably, is the cue to buy more iPads.
Interesting that both civil servant and Minister refer to “iPads” and not tablets. Surely they would not flagrantly promote an American company that allegedly avoids subsidising our profligate welfare state? Or does it mean that “iPad” is becoming a generic term like hoover? Apple is stuck on this one: On the one hand the company will welcome the publicity and the sales that will result, on the other the legal bods will be worrying about trade mark protection.
Source, The Telegraph, which still permits linking to its articles. Long may it continue.