Yeah, how dare people have emotional connections with musical instruments! The great (and very inexpensive) iPad will finally allow humans to become equals and set poor people free. Nostalgia is exactly what's wrong with this world.
Yes, this is very over the top, but the iPad is neither inexpensive (compared to your $50 garage sale guitar and synthie) nor is it sufficient to make music.
People enjoy music from instruments not only because someone was able to compose a song on it, but because the instrument carries emotion, there is sweat and pain in learning it, people become masters of their instruments and have actual connections to them. The iPad is a powerful device for making music, sure. But it's not exactly the device I would choose to allow impoverished children to create music. And I, personally, enjoy music more when I know it's actual people playing instruments rather than just a producer mixing some stuff and only recording the singing. Calling playing an instrument obsolete and "fingering" is insulting.
I get your sentiment, but I feel like your view on iPads and there being no musicianship to it is just wrong. The instruments in garage band have velocity sensitivity and can be played expressively by tapping the screen just as you can tap the keys on a piano or hit the marimba with some mallets.
In fact on some of the synthesizers you gain an additional mode of expressiveness because you can adjust your input as you're playing notes, similar to MPE synthesizers like the Osmose.
An iPad is more than sufficient for making music.
I say this as someone that really enjoys playing my instruments (mostly guitars) and wouldn't trade the experience for an iPad ever.
I mean that's just a nonsense statement. You can say "make music (that I don't like)" but you 100% cannot say that an iPad is insufficient to make music when thousands of people do that every day and tens of thousands of people enjoy their output.
Yes, this is very over the top, but the iPad is neither inexpensive (compared to your $50 garage sale guitar and synthie) nor is it sufficient to make music.
People enjoy music from instruments not only because someone was able to compose a song on it, but because the instrument carries emotion, there is sweat and pain in learning it, people become masters of their instruments and have actual connections to them. The iPad is a powerful device for making music, sure. But it's not exactly the device I would choose to allow impoverished children to create music. And I, personally, enjoy music more when I know it's actual people playing instruments rather than just a producer mixing some stuff and only recording the singing. Calling playing an instrument obsolete and "fingering" is insulting.