WE have already written quite extensively about why the iPad is technically inapt [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9] (never mind the inapt company which makes it -- a clearly misguided company that is suing Android [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] with Microsoft's support [1, 2] because it has fallen behind GNU/Linux).

Danny O'Brien does a very good job of explaining why I'm completely uninterested in buying an iPad -- it really feels like the second coming of the CD-ROM "revolution" in which "content" people proclaimed that they were going to remake media by producing expensive (to make and to buy) products. I was a CD-ROM programmer at the start of my tech career, and I felt that excitement, too, and lived through it to see how wrong I was, how open platforms and experimental amateurs would eventually beat out the spendy, slick pros.

I remember the early days of the web -- and the last days of CD ROM -- when there was this mainstream consensus that the web and PCs were too durned geeky and difficult and unpredictable for "my mom" (it's amazing how many tech people have an incredibly low opinion of their mothers). If I had a share of AOL for every time someone told me that the web would die because AOL was so easy and the web was full of garbage, I'd have a lot of AOL shares.

And they wouldn't be worth much.

The latest Mac OS X upgrade is both enormous, 784MB and necessary. It fixes no fewer than 88 security holes.