“The term ‘early adopter’ describes someone who immediately embraces a new technology,” Wanda Lau reports for Men’s Health. “The name for an entire city of someones? We call it the Plano Effect. In fact, these Texans haven’t just embraced tablet computing, they’ve practically given it a bear hug. That’s according to our rankings, which show that Silicon Valley’s San Jose is also tablet addicted and that Toledo is probably still running Windows 2000.”
“Alas, there’s no iPad app that could tell us who’s using tablets where. So we went with the next best thing: tablet use based on ad impressions, courtesy of ad network Chitika,” Lau reports. “We filled out our criteria with the number of Apple and Best Buy stores per capita, along with the percentage of households that own tablets, notebooks, or laptops.”
Top Tech-friendly U.S cities (with letter grade):
1. Plano, TX: A+
2. San Jose, CA: A
3. San Francisco, CA: A
4. Boise, ID: A-
5. Austin, TX: A-
6. Oakland, CA: B+
7. San Diego, CA: B+
8. Durham, NC: B+
9. Chesapeake, VA: B+
10. Colorado Springs, CO: B+
…
91. Laredo, TX: F
92. Norfolk, VA: F
93. Milwaukee, WI: F
94. Cheyenne, WY: F
95. Stockton, CA: F
96. Cincinnati, OH: F
97. Baltimore, MD: F
98. Detroit, MI: F
99. Fort Wayne, IN: F
100. Toledo, OH: F
Full article with the Top 100 list here.
Related article:
The top U.S. Mac-using cities and states – June 27, 2011
Hard to believe Chesapeake, VA is #9 and Norfolk, VA is #92, given they are right next to each other, only separated by a bridge.
Boise?! Didn’t Babs Johnson move there after the Marble incident?
I’m guessing someone graduated from Boise state. That’s fine, I like Boise football and the blue smurf turf as much as anyone else but come on, you expect us to believe they’re 4th on the list?!
Boise 4th, really?
I call bull-$hit!
And Plano (A+) is right next door to Dallas (C-). Not a very scientific survey by any stretch…
Plano has a totally different demo than Dallas. It’s a wealthier, more affluent, educated area of the metroplex.
I take these rankings with a tablet of salt.
I was thinking a 100lb block… I live in Stockton. We are between two Apple Stores. About a month after the first iPads came out, I attended a meeting in Stockton. There were 25 attendees… and 12 had iPads. It’s not unusual to see several people carrying iPads walking down the street. I’m not sure how they came by their statistics but I call BS on their grading system. It could be that the fault lies in the fact that many of Stockton’s residents drive over the hill to work… at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory… or in the Bay area.
This is stupid. Examining ad imprints is a measure of how many cheap bastages are running free apps, not how many people are using a device. And why the number of Best Buy and Apple stores would factor into the computation is a mystery. Seriously, Best Buy?
The survey must be right.
Toledo is certainly in the right position.
Isn’t that Klinger’s hometown?
lol – the other day, I had to explain to one of my co-workers, what M*A*S*H was.
Woohoo! Houston beat Dallas!
Best Buy is the tech store for the masses. Personally, I don’t like them. But, these rankings are consistent with other polls about tech savvy, tech sector, etc. It may not be 100%, but it’s a gauge.
Given Boise State’s 6% graduation rate, I’d bet you’d have a hard time finding anyone with a degree from there.
As for Boise itself, it’s home to Micron and a major HP center as well as several other tech companies and has the second most tech jobs per capita of any metro area in the US (to the SF Bay Area) so yeah, it will be high on the list.
Milwaukee surprises me, I’ve done a lot of Apple technical work in the schools around MIlwaukee, seemed like a pretty progressive community. Guess not.. Fun town none-the-less..
“When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it’s always twenty years behind the times.” -Mark Twain
But he also said (paraphrasing), “there is no sight more breathtaking than the sunrise over the hills of Kentucky (viewed from the Cincinnati side, of course)”.
Both my current city (Philly) and hometown (Cincy) near the bottom.
🙁