But I don’t think the iPad heralds the death of the personal computer or, as many people seem somewhat strangely concerned about, the end of tinkering. It’s not as though the iPad is going to murder curiosity. Some complain that Apple keeps locking out the jailbreakers with every revision of the iPhone OS, but the key point there is that the jailbreakers keep finding a way in. Cars are harder to tinker with today, but that hasn’t stopped people from becoming mechanics. It’s just that the vast majority of people don’t care how it works under the hood, as long as it gets them from point A to point B.

via www.macworld.com

I've been spending lots of time talking to many friends about this device and like I said previously, I think the people most irritated about the shortcomings of the iPad are technology people. Maybe we all need to play a little wait and see.

I was lucky enough to get a 128k Mac for my 12th birthday back in the day and it was instantly usable. Funny thing is that it didn't multitask at all … I could only do one thing at a time. The thing that made it work was that the one thing I could do was simply amazing. I was a 12 year old who had never really used a computer for any real amount of time prior to unboxing and hooking up my Mac myself … it was so elegant in its design that I wanted to push it to the limits of what it could do. The power was in the way I used it. If I remember correctly, real computer users rilled the original Mac for being underpowered and a toy.

I am looking forward to seeing if the iPad does indeed provide the same kind of inspiration that my original Mac did. I don't know because I've not had anything like it before.