Alex Payne: On the iPad →
While every other blogger/journalist/analyst (and almost everyone else) is writing about the screen size, the “custom silicon”, the awkward-looking keyboard and all the consumption that will be done on Apple’s upcoming device, Twitter’s Alex Payne makes a great observation:
The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.
I completely agree with him. Now, I’m not a Mac user, the only Apple product in my house is an iPod Shuffle I bought for my mom a few years ago, but if ~12 years ago my first computer hadn’t been a crappy Packard Bell running Windows 95, which I took apart, reassembled, and upgraded many times, I’m sure I would not be an engineer today.
