I honestly have spent very little time reading about the iPad.  As Dennis Green once eloquently put it “they are who we thought they were”.  Sure, the interface is a little different and it has a lot of new software, but at the end of the day, it is really just a big iPhone.  I think that is one of the reasons that this device has got a mixed reaction early on.  A lot of tech folks expected a little Apple magic to usher in the new category, and it never showed up.

Now that is not to say that the device will not sell.  Trust me, Apple will sell a bunch of these devices.  But, I will not be buying one.  Alex Payne said it best: “if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today”.  As a UI developer, who spends most of his time using a computer to create, a device like this seems strange to me.  But this is the new reality.  The iPad has ushered in the era of passive computing.  An era where the target audience of mass computing devices are people that aim to consume media, not create it.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 7:36 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.