There are children out there who are the next Jon Ives and Steve Jobs - people who will take the raw materials they have and produce what they consider to be high art, the best they can make with the technology and materials of the time.

Nothing has or should stop Apple from producing the absolute best examples of their vision. Nothing. And making something that is a commercial success is a part of that expression - one-off technological marvels are not as impressive as something that works for real people in the real world.

I think it is inspiring for the young programmers and designers and Make-subscribers out there to look at this thing and see what is possible to create. It is not necessary that they may take it apart and it is not a feature. They are not selling a toolbox, nor a platform for development.

If you think that the world is headed towards a computing world where no toolboxes or platforms are available, I think you need to make a better case. I see things getting better, not worse.

Apple try to make high art, with technology. To do that in the long term, you have to do so within constraints - commercial, technological, market, content, etc. They have been remarkably successful at doing so within those constraints, with some errors (eg the cube).

I am pleased that Apple made the iPad. It looks beautiful, and I am sure it functions well. I think it is something for humans to wonder at and be proud of - that this is the age we live in, and artisans exist who can design and produce such a device. I can't imagine myself buying one though. It's kind of like a Ferrari - I appreciate it, but it has nothing to do with me. And I wouldn't try to tinker with it. And, I'm not worried that all cars will one day be Ferraris.

If I could meet with DaVinci, and show him one example of our age, I'd show him an iPad. I think he would like it.

I write and run code every day, but rarely in front of the machine it executes on — even the editor isn't running on the machine I'm typing on. I live in browser tabs and terminal emulators displaying remote GNU Screen sessions.

When I have a terminal emulator compiled for Google NaCL (even if I have to port it myself), I'll be living exclusively in browser tabs.

http://www.nerdkits.com/videos/rc_car/

in which we used the iPhone Javascript API to capture touch/drag events, and sent them (via a laptop, and then a microcontroller) to a little toy car's transmitter. No SDK use or jailbreaking required at all. However, we had to rely on proprietary Javascript events, and had to include a laptop on ad-hoc wifi to relay the messages. Apple's restrictions certainly lead to major tradeoffs, but we were able to build something pretty neat and accessible regardless.

As a side note, they've locked down both the dock connector and the Bluetooth interface very tightly. Just buying the $99 dev license doesn't allow you to develop for either of those interfaces -- they have a separate "Made for iPod" program for that. The $99 isn't an insurmountable barrier for hobbyists who really want to tinker, but the "Made for iPod" certification probably is. (Some companies are using the audio input/output to hack around this restriction.)

http://github.com/raganwald/iGesture

Note that when I use the word "gesture," I am using it the way the HCI community uses it, to refer to strokes and combinations of strokes. iGesture is useful for implementing features like deleting things by "scrubbing" the screen, navigation by swiping the screen, and so forth.

First, because many, including Steve Jobs, say that this is a game changer, that it is going to make the laptop obsolete, it is going to change the future of computing forever. So it may be.

Second, therefore, because it is a closed platform, and because it is going to change the future of computing forever, when you buy one for your kid, all possible learning about how to hack things will instantly die in that child.

Third, who here learned, on their own, by using something in exactly the way that the manufacturer intended? I don't see all that many hands up.

I think kids or adults learn new ways of doing things by hacking. That is, they pick up some device and ask "hmm, I wonder what will happen if i connect these two wires".

So let me ask a semi-rhetorical question: Is there a way a kid can learn from an iPad by using it in a way that it was not intended? Of course there is. Are you telling me that there is no 8-year old that will find a way to use the iPad that will surprise his parents or peers?

Does anyone remember tube radios? I do (at the risk of dating myself), and I remember the sounds of doom when transistors came out. No user serviceable parts inside, says the label on the back. So has experimentation in Ham Radio died out? They build and launch satellites for goodness sake. New modes of digital communication, like WSJT (by Joe Taylor, Nobel Laureate, discoverer of a type of pulsar) to bounce signals off of meteor trails, or PSK31, a very narrow-band keyboard-to-keyboard mode of communication, or Cliff Stoll hooking up a kit from Ramsay Electronics to his Macintosh to graph the speed of cars going past a kid-filled street to help petition the city to put speed bumps there.

Fourth, where new ideas come from is not readily anticipated. And that is the point. The net of the article is that iPad totally locks down any possible avenue of learning for kids. I don't think so. If I were raising kids today, I would be much more concerned about their exposure to television.

All of those people will never have a jot of interest in how their device works - they just want it to be slick, look good and "just work".

It stands to reason that platforms for consumers will be bigger and more full of hype; simply because the market is bigger and the users are less cynical about the tech.

It does not mean that hackable platforms are going to disappear or become inaccessible.

I think the concern here is the precedent that Apple's success in this market would mean. Apple is notoriously hostile towards their development community, and is providing increasingly locked down platforms which make them the gate keepers for certain types of innovation (want integrated voice recognition on the iPad - wait for Apple to do it). If Apple succeeds here, others will feel they can create the same sort of locked platforms. You can already see this happening.

There's also a concern] for the future developers. If their homework requires a word processor and a web browser, then their parents might never see the need to buy them a general purpose computer.

And nothing, not a single obsolete machine, ever truly disappears. I'm confident that COBOL will still be running somewhere 2250.

When I got my hands on mac for the first time I was frustrated by user interface, but when I finally located terminal I brightened up "Hey. It's unix. I know this!"

I can't even imagine how terrible would be to have cool device that can do much but it's sealed from tinkering.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1240254

We'll always have choice - Google's entire strategy was being the opposite - open source, open apps, etc. There are dozens, if not hundreds of Android tablets, and concepts coming in the next 18 months, not to mention Windows 7 mobile etc

The Windows 7 mobile platform is just as closed as iPhones and iPads, and Apple is trying to have Android shut down by the courts. If they get their way, there will be no viable open alternatives for mobile computing.

Fixed it for you.