I expect multitasking to be added at some point, but really, I don’t miss it on my iPhone, and I don’t expect I’ll miss it on the iPad. Multitasking is not a feature in and of itself. What is the use case you actually want to support? Something like “listening to Pandora while playing a game” is a use case, and one I can sympathize with (though I’m pretty content listening to my own music library), something like “chat with my friends on GChat while I surf the web” is a use case (one that’s extremely clunky with the current push-notification system), but “I want to run apps at the same time because I can” is not really, in and of itself, useful. Apps on my iPhone generally start fast enough that the start-up time is about on the level of my brain’s context-switching latency anyway. I’d be surprised if it’s slower on the iPad.

Also, I’m a terrible garbage collector, I end up with about a billion tabs and apps open over time on my Mac, and then I need to go around cleaning up. I don’t really mind not having to do that on the iPhone, or have to use a process manager. Maybe it’ll be annoying on the iPad, guess we’ll see. Either way, I suspect some kind of support for these scenarios to emerge. If not true third-party multitasking (and this remains one of my prime suspects for iPhone OS 4.0), then some sort of built in chat/communication, or some other support for the scenarios where multitasking actually matters.

I disagree on two points with Flash. Firstly, the old “the customer is always right” saw. The customer is not always right, the costumer is in fact often an idiot who will enter his banking information on a phishing site, download spyware and viruses that promise a longer penis, and then blame *anyone but himself* for the outcome. This same user will gladly load all available flash content and then complain when they get shitty battery life (well, of course right now they complain they can’t get flash in the first place, so you could argue that really doesn’t change anything). There are myriad reasons not to include flash, and very few reasons to do so, and *increasingly fewer* (and this is actually the second point I think that goes most in Apple’s favor): more and more websites are moving away from flash and to HTML5/JS for video delivery and interactive content. If you think the iPhone and iPad play no role in this, I’d probably disagree with you. Apple’s decision, however autocratic, to categorically disable Flash on their touch devices is *making the web a better place* – not just for the iPad, but for everyone. Will there be growing pains? Sure. But Apple has never been afraid to move away from technologies long before they were well and truly dead (like floppies), always to the derision or dismay of certain users, and, thus far, mostly vindicated.

The iPhone and iPad not having flash will, one day, look just like the iMac dumping floppies. I’d bet on that.

As to the comparison of an iPad vs. MacBook, I really think it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison (even if, technically, they’re both Apples). It’s like comparing a toaster to an oven. While the oven is far more capable and powerful, and you *could* make toast in the oven, who does that? Granted, a toaster is not for everyone, either, and I’m certainly not saying that the iPad would be the right choice for you. You are a man of very… particular tastes. Heck, I’m not sure the iPad is right for me, but I would be surprised if people like my Mom don’t end up with one. But hey, I said the same about the iPhone and then ended up getting one on launch day after playing around with it. Interfaces matter more than features, I’ll gladly take a device with less features that does those few features really insanely well than one that does everything under the sun but makes me jump through hoops to figure out how to do the simplest things. It’s why I ended up moving away from Linux – I spend enough time each day trying to manipulate computers into doing what I want that, in my free time, I want stuff to Just Work(tm). I want to spend less time fiddling with the computer and more time with *the stuff I need a computer to do*. I can’t imagine replacing my Mac with an iPad, but I could imagine in the not-too-distant future spending more time on an iPad than on my Mac, and only going to the Mac for serious software development.

But time will tell. Right now I’m too poor to afford an iPad, so it’s really all academic anyway.

The movies are equally hit or miss. I’ve seen parts of the Lynch movie, but I guess for me the draw is the same as my draw to Bladerunner – no special effects!

Dune also has an odd legacies when it comes to adaptations. The David Lynch movie is supposedly awful (I have not seen it) while the Sci-Fi channel miniseries is true to the book, but with low production values and less then stellar acting. Surprisingly, the Sci-Fi miniseries adaptation of Dune’s sequels (Dune Messiah and Children of Dune) not only has better production values and acting, but is also frankly more interesting to watch.

For shared internet access & streaming music its fine. But beyond that a real gigabit network of wires carries the day around my place.