Not even 24 hours after Apple’s new iPad announcement, John Gruber at Daring Fireball resumed his vicious assault on female tech bloggers by quoting “Apple’s Press Conference Showed a Brand Unraveling” by Jolie O’Dell at VentureBeat.

It’s an op/ed that says there were no major problems with the presentation, just “a few minor but glaring inconsistencies” that were worth spending several paragraphs describing in context and explaining how they foretell the imminent downfall of Apple Inc. as we know it. For want of a tucked-in shirt, the $540 share price was lost.

The article’s actually not much worse than the bulk of the tech punditry circling the product announcement. Sure, it does try to make the case that Apple is falling apart after Jobs’s death, and it does so by making spurious comparisons between products released now and products released when Jobs was already no longer CEO of the company. I suppose it’s less compelling to acknowledge that it’s been a couple years now since Jobs was in charge of day-to-day operations, or to point out that Apple hasn’t actually released an industry-changing product every year since Jobs took over.

And it’s easier to write:

Last time Apple was without Jobs, it came out with a lineup of duds.

as long as you conveniently forget about the Apple Hi Fi.

But I guess it’s inevitable for a charismatic leader of a company to get praised for all his successes while the not-quite-successes get conveniently ignored. I just hope that it doesn’t reach Disney fan intensity, where 55 years from now we’re still having to hear “What would Steve think?” And I hope that people, even people surrounded by tech “news” all day, still have enough of a handle on reality to recognize how silly the complaints are.

O’Dell complains about the word “resolutionary” as something Jobs’s perfectionism would never have allowed. I think it’s goofy, but no goofier than anything else Apple marketing has done in the past 15 years. Maybe it’s just a case of their thinking differently.

One thing O’Dell doesn’t complain about, although it seems just about everyone else has, is that the announcement was just a “modest” or “unremarkable” update. As if it’s no big deal that they were able to quadruple the resolution of the iPad screen. Except the entire device is a screen. People have apparently forgotten back to a few weeks ago, when the speculation was that a “retina” display on the iPad would be kept to a much more expensive “HD” model. I’ve got to wonder whether releasing the new model without a significant price bump somehow undermined what an achievement it is to get that kind of pixel density on a mobile screen.

I’ll admit I was getting a little excited about the rumors of haptic feedback, even though they were based on pretty implausible speculation (all that just from the words “and touch” on an invitation for a touch screen device?) But that’ll probably come in the 7th or 8th revision of the iPad.

Which will apparently still be called the “iPad.” And we’re all supposed to be upset about that, for some reason. I’m not just singling out O’Dell here, either; this is something several people are actually complaining about.

O’Dell says that calling the new version “new iPad” is an inconsistency in branding that wouldn’t have been allowed under Jobs’s reign, even though it’s the weird iPhone naming pattern that’s inconsistent throughout the line of Apple products. Did you remember that the iPhone 3G is actually the second version of the phone? Followed by the iPhone 3GS? And the iPhone 4, which was actually the fourth iteration of the phone and not to be confused with “4G” cellular networks? And the 4S, which was the fifth iteration but dropped the “G”. Not since SimCity has a franchise shown such a reckless disregard for numbering.

O’Dell gets it right by saying (the obvious) “Likewise, the Apple brand stood for beauty in simplicity.” What could be simpler than “iMac,” “iPod”, “iPhone,” and “iPad?”

What struck me the most about the article, though, was this bit:

But Apple’s ethos is about so much more than hardware and technology: It’s supposed to be, as this outsider sees it, about aspiration, dreams, desires, the future, even Utopia. In a word, it’s only 30 percent about the tech and 70 percent about the branding.

(psst… “it’s only 30 percent about the tech and 70 percent about the branding” is 13 times more than “a word.”)

I’ve seen this claim made hundreds of times over the years, but this is the first I’ve seen it made by someone speaking favorably about Apple (Steve Jobs-era Apple, anyway), instead of being followed by complaints about the “Apple tax” or intellectually bankrupt words like “sheeple” and “fanboys.”

I’m assuming (and I’m being charitable in the assumption) that it’s rooted in a mis-interpretation of a talk Jobs gave about branding around the time of the “Think Different” campaign launch. But the point of that wasn’t that branding is more important than technology. The point was that the company’s core values are more important than specifications and speed bumps.

At the time, even the idea of a tech company having “core values” was unusual. The environment at the time was more like the various Android phones and tablets trying to differentiate themselves for having 4G LTE and Ice Cream Sandwich with an AMOLED screen and a 1.5GHz single-core processor instead of focusing on what you can actually do with them.

Pointing out that the new iPad has a higher resolution screen is talking about specs. Launching the new higher resolution screen along with a mobile version of iPhoto, showing how the better screen, faster wireless networking, and cloud storage can help you organize and share your photos as journals — that’s Apple branding. And “iPad HD” or “iPad Retina” or even “iPad 3″ is diametrically opposed to that branding. Saying “The iPad is the best tablet you can buy, and this is the best version of the iPad, and hey look at this happy family and their adorable children” fits the brand perfectly.

It’s been going on for well over a decade, but it still surprises me whenever I see someone making the claim that Apple’s appeal is mostly marketing. So much tech writing describes MacBooks, iPods, iPhones, and iPads as “status symbols,” taking it as a given that people buy them for the huge, shiny (or glowing) Apple logo on the back as opposed to what’s inside. That kind of knee-jerk reaction is baffling to me, and I’m someone who often has a hard time getting past the preconceived notion that anybody who drives a BMW is a douchebag.

Every Apple computer I’ve ever bought has turned out to be the best computer I’ve ever owned. (Except for the mice; the mice all universally suck). Every time I’ve tried to go with a Windows PC to save money, or to get some feature that’s not available on the Apple equivalent, I’ve gotten burned — burned enough that I’ve actually lost money in the transaction. I couldn’t care less whether it says Apple on the outside, as long as it works as well as I’ve grown accustomed to expect. Saying that it’s “only 30 percent tech” is pretty ludicrous, when no other company handles the technology as well.

Are there really people who buy these things for the logo, or because Steve Jobs told them to?

I try to stay wary of Apple’s marketing lingo: as much as I like using the iPad, it’s not “magical;” and for all the Apple-branded products I have scattered around the house, in various states of obsolescence but each one the best device I’ve ever owned, I’d never describe any of them as “insanely great.”

But Apple’s brief memoriam is absolutely right in calling Steve Jobs “visionary.”

There were plenty of obituaries and eulogies popping up across the internet within minutes after the official announcement of Jobs’s death; most ghoulishly composed right after his resignation (if not sooner) and polished off with an edited date and time. There were a few insightful ones as well; the best I’ve seen being Slate’s analysis of the wide reach of Jobs’s vision and a more personal thanks from Stack Overflow on behalf of all computer programmers.

But the best obituary was provided by Jobs himself, his commencement speech at Stanford in 2005. You have to wonder at the time whether he was aware he was delivering what would become the best summation of his life, not content with letting other people handle it.

That wasn’t the first time Jobs provided his own retrospective; the Think Different campaign for the Macintosh was every bit as much about Jobs’s own philosophy as it was about a computer brand. Jobs says as much in that video. And that ad campaign is a better testament to his legacy than any number of rote obituaries checking off his career achievements.

It may seem crass to associate a life’s work with a product marketing campaign, but I think it’s an outstanding symbol of Jobs’s vision, that his public life and his ideals are so inextricably linked with the Macintosh. It’s because of Steve Jobs that we can even think of computers and mobile phones as having “ideals” at all.

Even the tired criticisms of Apple echo the criticisms of Jobs himself. People decry Apple devices as being overpriced status symbols, while most of us who depend on Macs and iPhones use them simply because they do everything we want and do it well. People criticized Jobs for being an arrogant, stubborn, and sometimes ruthless; while he consistently described his perfectionism as a desire to reject the less-than-perfect in favor of making something that would genuinely change the world.

People are quick to point out that technologies existed before Apple used them, or that other devices have better technical specs — more slots, faster processors, more “open” technologies. But Steve Jobs’s greatest achievement was staying true to a holistic view of computing: individual specs aren’t as important as how they all work together. Technology isn’t the focus, what you do with technology is the focus. Xerox PARC first developed the GUI. But would Xerox have produced MacPaint and HyperCard?

It was the work of hundreds of hardware and software engineers, industrial designers, and graphic artists, not just Steve Jobs, that “invented” the Mac, iMac, PowerBook, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. But without Jobs’s dogged fixation on Apple’s core philosophy, they never would’ve come together as an integrated product line — not a phone, or an MP3 player, or a computer, but a line of technological products that could inspire you and enable you to make something great.

Getting that right once or twice could be dismissed as a fluke. Getting it right over and over again can only be genius. And it’s only by “connecting the dots” over Jobs’s career that you can see the remarkable consistency and devotion to that philosophy. How much did he influence the direction of Pixar, for example? It’s always a mistake to give too much credit to one person, but then you have to realize: Pixar was the studio that developed the most advanced computer animation and put it to use not as pure spectacle, but for storytelling. Again, it’s not the technology that’s important.

I never regarded Steve Jobs as a hero, and I barely knew anything about him before I read the retrospectives after his resignation from Apple. By most accounts of his management style, I would’ve hated working for him. I tend to be annoyed at the level at which people worship him. And I absolutely reject the ideal of the auteur, and I’ve seen far too many cases of people being treated poorly for the sake of staying true to one man’s arrogant “vision.”

And still, I’m more profoundly affected by the news of Steve Jobs’s death than I’d expected to be. His arrogance doesn’t seem just dogmatic, but inspirational: not just for the people making the computers, but for all of us using them. And “think different” no longer seems like just an opportunistic marketing plan to inspire people to buy computers and cell phones; but a genuinely-felt philosophy intended to inspire us to do great things with them. Maybe Jobs’s greatest achievement was understanding that business and art don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Jobs invented the personal computer. And I’ve only just recently started to have fleeting moments of awareness of how profound that is: getting directions from my cell phone while I’m listening to music after just playing a game or reading an article, and having the sudden realization that I’m living in the future.

From now on, when I watch Apple ads, I’ll try not to see ethnically-diverse models on skiing trips or vacations to Paris, or hear the carefully-selected focus-tested music in the background as actors pretend to be a father talking to his wife and daughter. Instead, I’ll try to appreciate the bigger picture, and understand the vision Jobs wanted us all to see: friends and families using innovation to make their lives better.

The official Twitter app finally went universal with its iPad version yesterday, pushing the iPad one step closer to being my most useful computer. (Next milestone: the OS 4.2 update, and a good blogging client).

I’ve been using Twitterrific, and its iPad version really is great, but it was understood between the both of us that I’d be jumping ship as soon as Atebits released its app. Tweetie basically defined what features a desktop Twitter client should have, then did it again on the iPhone version, and now once again on the iPad. There’s a reason Twitter bought it as its official client — not necessarily because it’s the best one, but because it’s the best one for what Twitter wants the service to be.

I’m not interested in writing a review, because there are already dozens of reviews out there (a lot of us were waiting, apparently), and because the app is free. If you’ve got an iPad and use Twitter, there’s no reason not to download it. My review is just that “hey, it’s great.” What’s interesting to me is how much thought went into the design of the app, and even more importantly, how significantly the design of one app can change how I perceive the entire device.

A lot of people seem to be dismissing the new approach as “nice UI touches” (or alternatively, “annoying gimmicks”). And the gesture stuff — pinching and two-finger dragging — is pretty gratuitous. But the big change isn’t just a new, slick, presentation. The change is the notion that absolutely everything in the app has context.

Everything you tap on causes a new panel to slide out with more information. There’s no new information here that you couldn’t get via the older clients, but the app is constantly making predictions about what you’ll want to see based on the content of the tweet — single tweets open the user’s profile, replies display the entire conversation, tweets with a photo link open the picture, tweets with a hashtag do a search on all the other tweets with that hashtag. Since none of the information is all that new, it may not seem like that big a deal. What formerly took two or three clicks now just takes one tap. But in practice, it feels like a leap from mid 80s text-chat technology to the bridge of the Enterprise.

I’m still not sure anyone really gets what Twitter is, exactly — even Twitter doesn’t or they wouldn’t be asking “How do you use it?” A lot of people, myself included, have always seen it as just instant messaging for lonely narcissists. I’ve got lots of interesting things to say about the state of my beard and bowel movements that are far too boring to tell a single real-life friend, but are just perfect for sharing with hundreds of strangers. As a result, Twitter clients have always tended to look like IM clients. That’s why I believe if you think of Twitter as global public IM, Twitterrific is still the best client for that.

But lots of other people, who are every bit as boring as I am but a billion times more famous, are using it for advertising or self-promotion. That’s where any hope of monetizing the service comes in, and that’s (I’m assuming) why the official Twitter app emphasizes the external content in tweets instead of just the text itself. When you first start the iPad version, the main timeline (what used to be the focus in older clients) looks awkwardly small on the screen. As soon as you start scrolling and tapping, though, you can see what the designers want the Twitter service to be: a stream — or, I suppose, firehose — of information.

The only feature from Twitterrific that I miss is that there’s no quick and easy way to look at a person’s profile and find out if they’re following you. I can imagine that’s intentional, too — they’re not pushing individual conversations as much as individually tailored public streams of news and links. Part of the appeal of twitter is that contacts are asynchronous and not fake “friends”; if someone’s saying stuff you want to hear, it shouldn’t really matter whether or not they want to hear what you have to say. But that’s about the only place so far where Twitter’s enforced idea of how I should be using their service has been an annoyance.

The rest of the time, I’m just impressed by how dense the average Twitter feed is, all the stuff streaming by that I never bothered to click on before. And impressed by how the iPad app just seems to know what I want to look at. Presenting relevant information automatically instead of making you look for it seems like just a convenience (or annoyance, depending on how slow your internet connection is). But the more I use the iPad Twitter app, the more I get the sense that this is exactly the kind of presentation that will make tablet computers come into their own.