I’ve now had a couple of opportunities to play around with an iPad, and to surreptitiously watch other people use it. I have strong and mixed feelings. The touchscreen interface is pretty wonderful and I have no doubt that it’s going to send the mouse the way of the floppy disk. But the walled garden aspect disturbs me. It smells a little Microsoft-y. As long Apple’s products are so delightful, I guess I don’t care that deeply what their business philosophy is. But not everything that Apple makes is equally delightful, and gorgeous though it is, the iPad gives me some qualms.
A little background. I got my first Mac exposure in 1988, eighth grade, back in the days of System 6 and Pagemaker 1.0. It was love at first use. The mouse interface is old hat now but then it was a tremendous improvement on typing arcane DOS commands.