Before you agree with Apple's position because it makes nice computers, replace "Apple" with "Microsoft" -- then try to imagine the howls and lawyers that would have gotten late night calls that would have ensued if Microsoft had tried to prohibit developers from writing Windows programs in the wrong software toolkit. (Among other consequences, you'd have no iTunes or Safari in Windows.)
I don't know how you're supposed to feel great about buying into this dictatorial/fascist and closed vision of computing. Faniboi's give apple and Satan incredible sums of money and then let apple and Satan control the device entirely, but perhaps having seen first hand what a dictatorial/fascist and closed society brings I'm more in tune than most.
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If you'd like to get people to talk to you at a crowded event, bring an iPad. You'll be holding forth before new friends in no time. And why not? The iPad is the closest thing I've ever seen to the Newspad of Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey" -- or the tablet computer Jean-Luc Picard toted around in "Star Trek: The Next Generation."
If, however, you're just looking for a simpler, cheaper way to tackle your digital duties, the case for Apple's new device is not so clear.
As I write in today's column, the iPad isn't ready to take a laptop's or a netbook's place -- even if its touchscreen and speedy processor help it do some tasks better than those devices -- and it's also too hefty and bulky to wipe e-book readers off the map. Plus, it suffers from the sort of glitches I don't expect to see in an Apple product, such as the byzantine file-sharing routines required in Apple's iWork software or the datebook-style calendar application that doesn't let you swipe across the screen to flip to the next page.
In short, I don't get the "magical and revolutionary" vibe that Apple chief executive Steve Jobs touted at the iPad's January unveiling.
One co-worker, an iPhone user, even called the iPad a toy. (He didn't mean that in a non-complimentary way. But still.) I wouldn't go that far; if I didn't need to sign into our newsroom editing software, I could imagine using the 3G version of the iPad, coupled with a Bluetooth keyboard, as a reporting tool.
(If the iPad could download and install its own software updates, it might also function well as an Internet beginner's only computer -- a simple, safe and cheap Web and e-mail reader.)
But the most serious criticism of the iPad goes much further -- the argument that Apple's tight control of the App Store unforgivably infringes on your computing liberties. This gets its harshest expression in Cory Doctorow's denunciation of the device on the Boing Boing blog, but you can find many more moderate versions of it from the likes of Freedom to Tinker blogger Ed Felten and media critic Jeff Jarvis.
I appreciate simplicity and stability as much as the next tech writer, but I think Apple is way out of line in its stewardship of the App Store and have repeatedly said so here.
Last night, news surfaced about yet another move by Apple to limit what software you can install on the iPhone and the iPad: a new clause in its developer agreement that forbids programmers from rewriting converting an application first coded for another platform. This is an extraordinarily arrogant sort of control-freakery: First Apple has asserted the right to veto developers' iPhone software for any reason, and now it won't let them cover their bets by starting with a cross-platform code base.
This betrays a fair amount of contempt, and not just toward programmers. Does Apple not think iPhone users can discern the difference between a carefully crafted application and one sloppily recoded from some Adobe Flash widget?
