The iPad's out and prompting happy reports from various corners. Just check out Daring Fireball for a cornucopia of iPad links.
mathowie for one is pretty pleased: "The ABC-tv and Popular Science magazine iPad apps feel like they were ripped out of a sci-fi movie and I'm still amazed they're real."
Cory Doctorow and Mark Pilgrim's conviction that the iPad is a Bad Thing and not only won't they buy one but YOU SHOULDN'T EITHER!! is much-discussed. I've considered a lengthy argument of my own but have lacked the cycles. Greg Knauss had a pretty good response, including these fine phrasings:
Simplicity has a purpose, and complexity -- "hackability" is just a form of complexity -- has costs. ... The story of technology over the course of the past 20 years is the expansion of one at the expense of another. It's been more than a fair trade, despite detours and disasters and greed and stupidity. To object to this positive (and historically inevitable) trend on the grounds that you maybe can't trade comics anymore is to remove the benefits of technology from billions of potential users, for your own myopic ends.
... If you need to change a battery to feel like a whole man, then perhaps you're missing the point.
I will say this, in the end it just seems weird to have so much hate/fear of people liking and wanting a product, and to act as though Apple has a gun to everyone's head which will keep them from ever trying to make anything of their own. It's a strange reaction.
Returning to mathowie's tweets for a sec: at this Flickr page showing his 4-year-old drawing an Easter bunny on an iPad is the entirely appropriate comment:
According to Doctorow this is KILLING her creativity, Matthew!! KILLING IT!!
I'll surely be getting an iPad someday, just not for a while. Have talked myself into the position that I have to finish a certain related project first.
I'm very intrigued by the nicer interfaces you can make with such a big touchscreen -- see gizmodo's screenshots of several iPad apps for a sense of the variety & capabilities now in play.
The Netflix streaming is a pretty exciting prospect all by itself.
Today's date can be read as either US-format (m-d-y) or sensible-format (d-m-y).
I think I'm just Flash-support away from ordering one of these babies. For sure, streaming Netflix, especially while traveling, is nice (I still prefer the TV to a computer at home), but it's having access to web content that usually eats my mornings (or late nights) that is most appealing (or most rationalizing of my gizmo lust). However, my biggest time sink is a flash-based game, and to not have access to that would be torture (and make me unlikely to shlep the thing around)...
Perhaps I'm being myopic, but I'm just not feeling it. I already have an iPad, and it has the additional benefit of a keyboard. I call it a "laptop."
-KcM