I was looking through the ol’ archives and realized I had never written about this thing. I have a draft called “what the world needs now is a four-month-late post about the iPad.” So clearly I wasn’t in love with the result. But I also quite like this one that I did about the iPhone a year into owning it, when I was able to look at how it had changed my… life seems a little hyperbolic, so let’s say… personal computing cocktail.

I’ve had the iPad for eight months. Things have changed for sure because of it.

The comparison you want to make is to a laptop. I’ve been a laptop user for a good ten years, so I understand why. You want to know if the iPad can replace your laptop. It’s very hard to answer this, but if I had to, I’d say no. It’s totally not the same thing.

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Andy Ihnatko on the iPad – what that guy said. I had a post drafted about the iPad from a few weeks ago but it didn’t seem to add much to the talk at the time. Despite initially feeling underwhelmed, the product quickly made sense. Traditional computer interfaces don’t work on small screens (they barely work on 12” screens let alone 10”), and rather than start from scratch Apple is building upon the touch OS that when you think about it is already quite an achievement in usability, much more so than the Mac OS. There are a lot of super-non-nerds I know who recently got iPhones and they understand it in minutes. In a couple days they are showing off their new apps. This never happened with the Mac or Windows.

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