PPS: Thanks Ian, Nick and everyone who is commenting for making this is a really interesting and high-quality discussion!

A quick ‘first day back a t work after Easter’ breakdown of my rationale goes a bit like this:

• The core assumption is that innovation and free creativity is an ultimate good.
• This requires open platforms where people can create and distribute whatever they like.
• Open platforms are open to abuse and require increased cognitive load on behalf of the user to distinguish the trustworthy from the insidiuos.
• The more the world connects the higher the risk of and damage caused by identity and data theft.
• Users need to learn how to protect themselves in this environment as well as all the detail about each affordance granted by a new service and how, if at all, they interoperate.
• Learning requires confidence and exploration.
• Users are frightend to do so bacause they can make consequential mistakes. (Do not underestimate the acute feelings of anxiety and guilt when someone is told they have compromised a password or allowed a virus to be installed…)
• This fact is exluding an enormous number of people who simply want to participate, connect and communicate. (I strongly suspect far more than are excluded by physical disability, although I have no authoritative figures).
• The advocates of openness seem to have no coherent provision for these people.
• Apple does.

The true prize is not innovation, but collective intelligence. Until the vast majority can participate, innovation will be confined to a small elite of people who have sufficient knowledge to create services. In effect the need to allow the free creation of services is masking the affordance to engage in other kinds of creation (the writing, painting, communicating, learning that Ian talks about).

I personally do not use Apple devices. But whenever a non-geek friend or family member asks my advice about devices to buy, I suggest they pay the extra for an Apple device as it is a price worth paying to no longer live in fear.

There will be a two-tier landscape because the desires for each are passionate, valid and well distributed. I hope the demarcation between them, and the behaviours that demarkation engenders, are productive to us all.

The world today has the gnarliest spectrum of technologies available… and on opposite ends of this spectrum, Arduino & the iPad; polar opposites, suiting polar opposite interests. I love and make things with Arduino, my mom can use & love and discover a cornucopia of new things thru the iPad.

I could make things for the iPad if I felt like it, but I don’t- and I have the money to buy one, but I’m not going to- because I just think it’s silly to buy things I don’t “need.” Unless it’s amazing shoes. I digress.

I appreciate Cory so, so much for throwing his point of view into the whirlwind of hypnotic ga-ga over the iPad. I think our consumerist world needs it, frankly, to not embrace wholeheartedly… but to just chew on and think about. For that Cory, thank you so much.

The world is a better place from the options before us. Arduino and other hackable hardware will forever keep the geeks & hackers & makers creatively churning, and the iPad and it’s brethren will continue to push technology further into full-cultural ubiquity, and by being so “visionary” and weird, it will also open doors for cultural permeation of technology into the mainstream in unexpected ways and with unexpected emotional needs met that otherwise would have gone un-tapped (the iPhone and iPod have both done this in spades).

Finally- as a designer- what Steve Jobs has done through being the fanatical asshole that he is, for raising the bar on what expectations of industrial design innovation needs to be via pushing product design as a whole, a million miles farther than any other hardware manufacturer could- thank you.

I hate DRM. I hate the publishing “business model” Apple operates on now and see it as being on par with McDonalds making more money from owning land that it leases to franchisees & farmers.

The industry has exited it’s utopian beginnings, and is now in it’s angry teenage years- let’s all just get over it, and embrace the geeks, freaks, cheerleaders, fat kids, gawky kids, etc., and just continue to press on as intelligently as possible. M’kay?

Your contacts, calendar, and notes can be easily exported. Music? DRM-free, if you wish. Ditto video (you don’t have to buy from the iTunes Store). You can export from iWork to other file formats easily enough. Or don’t use iWork.

If you mean lock-ins for applications… how is there any more lock-in than on the Mac, or any other platform where the source code for apps is closed?

If you mean method of distribution – yes, there’s a single source there. Although, of course, if you want to develop something for yourself (and 99 of your friends) you can use ad hoc distribution to do so. The iPhone SDK is free to download (you only need to be a registered developer to distribute via iTunes).

But there’s no more, or less, interoperability between Android (say) and iPhone than there is between Mac and Windows, or Mac and Linux, or Linux and Windows.

I do not think that it is a binary choice between open source devices and Apple, that is what I think is being completely missed in this debate.

The choice is between interoperability and lock-ins. Interoperability need not be open source, it used to be the norm until Apple started going the lock-in way. I will wait until I can find a device that delivers interoperability. There are various candidates out there already, my hopes are on the Ink Adam.