This is a link list for my own re-reading a couple of moths ahead. Those aticles to me include the best assumptions on what the iPad ist meant to be, and what it will do to the general computing and media consumption market:
- Daring Fireball: “Manual computers, like the Mac and Windows PCs, will slowly shift from the standard to the niche, something of interest only to experts and enthusiasts and developers.”
- Popsci: “The iPad, then, is a transition to a future when, in Apple’s mind, multitouch is so good that we no longer need anything but a screen.”
- Daniel Tenner: “In short, most people don’t really need a proper computer at all. And they mostly don’t want one. Many people spend all day working in front of a computer, and they simply don’t like the idea of coming home to yet another computer that looks just like the one they use at work.”
- Stevenf.com: “The iPad as a particular device is not necessarily the future of computing. But as an ideology, I think it just might be.” Old-world computing equals PCs and Mac with full access and filesystem, New-World Computing is a closed ecosystem with all kinds of abstractions.
- Alex Payne: “The iPad is an attractive, thoughtfully designed, deeply cynical thing. It is a digital consumption machine.”
- Peter Kirn: “To put it briefly, I think the new, mobile Apple is doing immense harm to the computing legacy the company has forged… It’s a blow to open source alternatives, but also to open development in general: the power of interchangeable hardware and software, on which everything we do with music and visuals on computers is based.”
Again, media consumption will change even faster than we thought. The iPad is not a Wifi-Extension for some Library on some home PC, it IS the library, may it be local or in the cloud. IP broadcasting and on-demand is even more mandatory after this release, and the prospect of the future of general-purpose computing as pointed out in those articles.