Swingman wrote:

The shallow minded bitch about the lack of bells and whistles, and **** and
moan about the closed architecture, without understanding that the trade
off is a robust device that will give you ten hours of use without a
battery charge, unmatched portability, applications for every conceivable
pursuit/task, an intuitive interface, and a virtually trouble free OS
architecture, requiring no technical expertise whatsoever to be productive,
that you can carry in one hand, all day, every day.


The may asked:
Never having used an ipad myself, I am compelled to ask what is
different from this and what one does with a common PC today, and has
done for years?

And I answered:

The "interface" (how you interact with it)--it has a touch sensitive
screen and understands "gestures". It's closer to being an appliance,
and is lighter, portable, and you can upgrade it by replacing it every
year or two. My wife has one. IIRC, It doesn't even have a USB port.


Reviewing what I wrote again, I think it's a fair answer. No? If he
doesn't require portability, then he's not missing a thing. In fact,
he's probably better off with out it, like me. I enjoy my Logitech
Z-5500 5.1 speaker system too (which I got for $200) and, especially, my
monitor, mouse and *keyboard*!


While the current iPad/tablet technology does not yet take the place of the
traditional computing environment, it is unmatched in freeing the user to
focus on tasks in places the _traditional_ computing environment does not
gracefully go.