[Pastiche]

Maybe barnes is right: http://www.slate.com/id/2249872/pagenum/all

Now in 2010, the iPad takes the same ideas to their logical extreme. It is a beautiful and nearly perfect machine. It is also Jobs' final triumph, the final step in Apple's evolution away from Wozniak and toward a closed model. The main, and most important, concession to openness is the App Store, a creation that shows Jobs learned something from Apple's bitter defeat by Microsoft in the 1990s. You cannot run software Apple does not distribute itself. You cannot access the file system unless you hack the machine. You cannot open the hood; indeed, the machine lacks any screws. I compared my iPad to various appliances around the home—coffee machines, toaster, cameras—and the only thing comparably sealed was, well, an iPod. The iPad has no slots; its only interface is an Apple-specific plug. Oddly enough, this all means that the iPad is not a machine that Apple's founders, in the 1970s, would have ever considered buying.


But this may not matter for many people, for the iPad is handy tool for getting well-produced content from the industries that make it. And even if it doesn't do everything a computer does, it still does most things. Still, it is meant for consumers not users, and as such has far more in common with the television than the personal computer. It is not meant for the Homebrew Computer Club—for tinkerers, hobbyists, or for that matter, creators.


Steve Wozniak has said that he pre-ordered three iPads, two for himself and one for a friend. This is a testament to his incredible good nature and his loyalty both to the firm that marginalized him in the 1980s and to a friend, Jobs, who refused to write a foreword for his memoirs. Yet somewhere, deep inside, Wozniak must realize what the release of the iPad signifies: The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists.

Outlines exactly why I wont be getting one. I am afraid of the movement in computing that Apple symbolizes, closed platform, dominated by content producers and hardware/software manufacturers.



The article describes the two competing streams of computing today, one of openness and one of closed environments.