varunnangia.com

So two thoughts about iPad:

1. I hate Flash. With a tremendous passion. It is a bug-ridden, resource-hungry abomination that has encouraged bad design to proliferate around the web. That said, if you have a “wicked fast” processor, especially one that isn’t “wasting” cycles on things like managing the overhead of multitasking, there’s no excuse not to have Flash. By all means, leave it off by default – I know, I would – but the choice to not have Flash should be up to the user, not Apple.
2. The more I look at iPhone OS X, the more convinced I am that Apple’s perfect OS in Steve Jobs’ – or whomever is running the OS side of things – mind was System 7. If you’ve never had the … pleasure of running an OS that was not multitasking or multithreaded, you’ve not enjoyed the fun that we System 7 users had; a “favourite” memory that comes to mind is of waiting for minutes or hours for Word or Clarisworks to spool a print job. It was enough to push me to Windows and leave me firmly there until OS X 10.3 “Panther” came out.

In short, let’s say I have a budget of about $1000. I can get for $829 an iPad, with 1GHz ARM processor, 64GB of storage, a 9.7″ screen, a lot of nifty sensors, a 3G radio and the ability to run one task at a time. Or, for $999 – or $799, if you’re shopping at Microcenter these days – I could get a MacBook, with a 2.0GHz dual core x86 processor (remember here the law of x86 inevitability), a 13.3″ screen, 160GB of storage, a beautiful multi-touch trackpad, and the ability to run an absolutely arbitrary number of apps. Oh, and, let’s not forget, I could use Flash on sites where I didn’t have Flashblock running. To me this is a no-brainer: go for the MacBook. You’re trading off a 3G radio*, a bunch of sensors, some amount of portability and some 3 hours of runtime, for a lot more computing power, more storage and the ability to multitask. I’m sure there are people for whom the iPad makes sense. I’m not one of them.

*: Given that WAN is powered by AT&T, it’s highly debatable you actually have a 3G radio. The last conversation I had with an AT&T rep had this choice line from me: “I’ve lived in countries where the annual income is less than what you take home in a week, and they had better networks than you can dream of.”