January 29, 2010, 2:59 AM — All right, I admit it: after who knows how many months of me doubting the point of the future iPad in this blog, I fell under its spell, from afar, on Wednesday. I tried to be kind of snarky in my wrap-up, but, you know, the iPad just seemed cool. I was jealous of all the cool kids in San Francisco who got to hold and play with the device. I made idle purchasing decisions, in my mind.
And then the backlash started, and I got a little defensive about it! People seem really anxious -- or angry -- about the fact it's a near computer but it's locked down like the iPhone. This does not exercise me, much. Despite Apple's claims that the iPod is the future of computing, there will always be real computers for people who want them. John Gruber compares it to a car with automatic transmission, and that's probably about right. Other people criticize it as being slick instead of feature-rich, not getting that for Apple products, "slickness" -- which is a way to denigrate well-designed UIs -- is the whole point. The iPhone wasn't as technically capable as other smartphones when it came out, except in the one way that mattered: it made it easy for people to get at and use the features it did have, and revealed its competitors to be buggy, irritating junk. The iPad will do the same for other tablet devices, before they even come out.
That having been said, the question of whether I need one is still open. Wait, scratch that: I definitely don't. The question of whether I want enough to drop the money is the one to focus on, and upon reflection, the answer is still no. If I travelled a lot, and the only applications I used on a regular basis were Mail, a Web browser, a word processor, and media playback, then yeah, I'd seriously consider it (with the physical keyboard). But I don't travel that much, and when I do, there are a just a few real computer apps that I feel like I can't do without.
So who is the target owner of this device, other than the Mac freak who has to have everything? I guess it's someone who wants to drive an automatic -- who only uses the computer as -- to use an phrase that's been bouncing around the industry for more than a decade -- an Internet appliance. But nobody's been able to make the Internet appliance work yet, because it turns out that most people want just a little bit more than that. We'll see if it works for Apple.
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