Technology at an Unbelievable Price

When I read that Apple introduced a new device, the 'iPad,' at an unbelievable price, I thought it must be irony. They make quality products, but are hardly known for their competitive pricing. Still, at a starting price of five hundred bucks, you can own a tablet -a computer consisting of one touchscreen- build by Apple, which is always good for your coolness attribute.

The specs: 0.5 inches thin. 1.5 pounds. 9.87 inch iPS display, full capacity multi-touch, 1 ghz Apple A4 chip, 16, 32, or 64 GB Flash storage. Extensions and add-ons: 3G, dock, keyboard. Best of all, 10 hours of battery life.

Its smaller and lighter than any netbook, and just looks like an oversized iPhone. What they really did right is running a variant of the iPhone OS on top of it instead of MacOs. Instead of point-and-click you can now touch, scale, wave, prod, gesture around applications, folders, photos, puppets which is the exact right thing to do on a tablet. Yes, you can type, but that remains a kludge.

And that's the thing, from the start I disliked windows, because of its, well, windows. Its all about pixel real-estate, and I always want my application to hold the maximum numbers of em, preferably almost the whole screen. My MacBook pro has a functional multi-touch pad: Why am I still bound to a menu and windows, where I repeatedly need to point at a few pixels, when a wave and a click could easily do the same?

Point-and-click? The same future as VHS.

Waving...