iPad? Really? (was RE: Voice recognition will never kill the keyboard was: Re: Evolution)

I admit I bought a MacBook (two actually) for a couple reasons over a Wintel laptop, not the least of which was the aesthetic consideration. There is no doubt they are better looking IMO, and they have a nice uncluttered design. I don't need a zillion different interfaces in/out of the thing. Seems like every wintel laptop manufacturer out there wants to plaster a bunch of different connectors all over the laptop for every conceivable interface type. These days, USB is all I need. I think one thing that Apple really has an advantage over the competition is their power brick design. Not only is it incredibly small, it has that snazzy magsafe power connector, which has saved my laptop untold damage (and that's after having owned an HP which I had to replace the power jack on). The other big reason was OS X itself. I wanted to play with it, and it had the advantage of having Xcode included with the OS, the dev tools for Windows costs a lot (yeah yeah, Vis C++ Free Edition). I have been very happy with how turnkey the OS is while still feeling professional, Time Machine is awesome, and upgrading a hard disk (thanks to Time Machine) was very, very easy. I think the 5-10% of things that I don't like about my MacBook (namely some case weaknesses) have been addressed in the subsequent designs. Does everything I need it to do. Is it the end all, be all? Nope, but I still really like it a lot. YMMV. ________________________________ From: Daniel Seagraves <dseagrav at lunar-tokyo.net> To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Mon, October 4, 2010 8:10:17 AM Subject: Re: iPad? Really? (was RE: Voice recognition will never kill the keyboard was: Re: Evolution) On Oct 4, 2010, at 7:42 AM, Jules Richardson wrote: Choice of device or operating system should be based on the intended user and workload required. It's not a religion. Saying "I am typing this on a mac..." to qualify bashing someone for their choice is like saying "I have a few black friends too..." to qualify racism. It's hollow and cliche and nobody believes it. You just sound like a dope to everyone except other people who share your bias. I have a Mac and it pays my bills. When I go home I run Windows for playing games. I have a Wii and a Playstation 3 and an iPhone, all of which are hacked for various reasons. Here at work we have many Windows machines and many Linux machines. Each item is picked for their intended task and workload. Some of these workloads are more clearly defined than others, and some of them exist just for entertainment value, but none of them is "better" than the others. You can't say with any sort of accuracy that device X is stupid and useless in all situations because you don't know every possible user/workload combination in existence. Nor can you say that item X is better than item Y in all respects for every workload because everything is designed differently by different people for different goals. It's like saying a crescent wrench is always better than a Vise Grip. They may look vaguely similar, they may have the same user in mind, but they were designed with two different tasks in mind, so trying to compare them and speak authoritatively about this comparison is flawed and intellectually dishonest.