<story><title>How A Great Product Can Be Bad News: Apple, iPad, and the Closed Mac</title><url>http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/01/27/how-a-great-product-can-be-bad-news-apple-ipad-and-the-closed-mac/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zacharypinter</author><text>This post adequately sums up my concerns.&lt;p&gt;Here we have a device that doesn&apos;t support USB thumbdrives, doesn&apos;t support dropbox (at least system-wide, I assume the dropbox iphone app would work), is unable to run ruby or any of my other dev scripts/tools, cannot install firefox or firefox plugins, etc.&lt;p&gt;I do not want to see computing head this direction.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>coffeemug</author><text>My dad, mom, grandma, and grandpa can watch videos, look at photos of their kids/grandkids, send e-mails to their relatives oversees, and read their favorite books on it, all without the need for a &quot;computer-savvy guy&quot; who has to teach them how it works, and fix it when it&apos;s broken. In other words, it&apos;s a logical conclusion of the personal computer revolution. I understand you need to run your Ruby scripts, but this product was designed for the 99% of the people in this country instead. You&apos;re not the target audience.</text></comment>
<story><title>How A Great Product Can Be Bad News: Apple, iPad, and the Closed Mac</title><url>http://createdigitalmusic.com/2010/01/27/how-a-great-product-can-be-bad-news-apple-ipad-and-the-closed-mac/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zacharypinter</author><text>This post adequately sums up my concerns.&lt;p&gt;Here we have a device that doesn&apos;t support USB thumbdrives, doesn&apos;t support dropbox (at least system-wide, I assume the dropbox iphone app would work), is unable to run ruby or any of my other dev scripts/tools, cannot install firefox or firefox plugins, etc.&lt;p&gt;I do not want to see computing head this direction.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rimantas</author><text>I wonder, how many people were sad when gearbox in their car went from stick to auto, when choke control disappeared, when you could no longer tinker with carburetor, because it was gone.&lt;p&gt;There will always be two groups of people, one group of those wanting to hack things, and another, much much larger group of those who want just use them. For every one John who wants to chip his car engine there will be five millions Joes who just want to get from the point A to the point B with the least hassle possible. As it happens Apples iProducts are aimed at the second group—deal with it. Just like ITMS and App Store may be the fastest and most hassle-free way to get what you want on your device.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve spent some time thinking, do I want iPad. The answer is: I do. I like to read when in bed, iPad is perfect for this. I cannot take my iMac to bed, and reading with notebook is not  as convenient as it can be with iPad: that damn keyboard gets in a way, event when I barely use it.&lt;p&gt;iPad is very well suited for what it is intended for: surfing the web, reading the books, some email. Let&apos;s not forget it has UI specifically tailored for the device and multitouch use. It should be great for tasks it was meant to do, and not so great for all others.&lt;p&gt;It is time to stop thinking about anything with CPU inside as the computer.</text></comment>