The article waxed on about how iThings are hard to take apart and modify. Let's see... Why did I start buying iThings? Was it to tinker? I think not. I bought iThings to relegate tech gadgets to that place in my life I think they belong: mere appliances. There when I need them. Out of my face when I want to do something else. I'm picking up an iPad tomorrow. Will I use it all day every day and all night too? No. It will collect dust just like my netbook collects dust. But for those times when I would normally grab my Ubuntu netbook and head to a meeting, I can grab the smaller and lighter iPad and it will serve the same purpose just as nicely. And I might even spring for a keyboard dock one of these days. I've already got the BT keyboard that I use with my Mac Mini HTPC so if I want to do some intense typing "on the road" I'd rather have the iPad with iWork, the BT keyboard and a cardboard easel with me.
I have thought quite a bit about buying a Kindle. The killer iPod app for me was Amazon Kindle. I can read manybooks.net stuff and I can download and read best sellers in a matter of seconds.
Will I jailbreak my iPad? Perhaps, but I think not. Will I take it apart? Perhaps if a good self battery replacement tutorial shows up. I went through the 4 putty knife ritual to get my G4 Mac Mini up to a gig of RAM so I'm up to popping open my iPad if I can do it without undue risk.
But what I'm not up for is tinkering for the sake of tinkering. I don't think that makes me a doublewide couch potato simply because I want a gadget that always turns on when I hit the power switch.
It's a tragedy that there aren't easily hackable hardware products around any more. It's not an Apple problem. It's an American problem. If you want to tinker with electronics, this isn't the continent for it. Try looking for electronic components. There is the ever shrinking Vidmar cabinet at your local Radio Shack (which itself is about to be acquired by Best Buy) and there is mail order from Digikey. If you're lucky, there is a Fry's nearby. All those small outfits were killed off by Radio Shack which is in turn being killed off by a consumer society where nobody wants to learn anything or build anything. But this isn't any one company's fault. Not even Microsoft. Well maybe it's Microsoft's fault. Isn't everything Microsoft's fault?
Please don't blame Apple for selling me what I need. Sure I
want tinkerable gadgets but what I
need are gadgets that don't require tinkering to get a job done. I need information appliances.
Ahhh the good old days, (bad old days?) Sometimes I miss rotating the distributor cap to get engine timing corrected or tinkering with the points trying to set the gap correctly. No wait. I don't miss that stuff. I'm sure there are a few car enthusiasts around who do. But the rest of us simply need the car to start and run. Do you think car companies could make any money selling millions of card that require tinkering every time the weather changes? I don't think so either.
There are a lot of people I'm upset about when it comes to the dumbing down of American society but seriously Apple isn't to blame. And there's another point. Apple almost went broke "back in the day". Now they have discovered the "evil" of charging money for and making a profit on the stuff they make. And yes, like the Godfather they want to "wet their beak" in content other people produce. Sure the walled garden approach to the app store gets on my nerves. Sure the difficult to modify hardware is not for tinkerers.
But take a moment to think about what you are really asking for when you are upset at Apple for making a closed architecture product that is reliable but difficult to "mod". Who do you want Apple to sell to? 5.9 billion people who simply care that the thing works when they need it or the half a million or so tinkerers that cannot afford to provide Apple enough profit to keep the lights on in Cupertino? Apple has chosen wisely and I congratulate them for figuring this out before they followed Amiga to the pages of
oldcomputers.net.
I will pick up an iPad tomorrow. I will pay a little extra for AppleCare. I don't plan on running back to the forums to rant 3 weeks from now when the 64 gig model suddenly comes with a camera, vibrating massage and anti gravity for $300 less. That's why they call it the bleeding edge. But I do want a smaller, lighter netbook. And I do want a "bigger iPod" so I can read my Kindle books more easily. And I won't feel like I made a mistake buying it because I can't run Photoshop CS4 or Mathematica on it on day one.
I recommend reading the article. It represents a point of view that I can relate to but I cannot agree with, and I certainly can't agree with the allegation that Apple regards the target market as lazy and stupid.
closed ecosystem is a big deal to some people, to others it is a new place to sell their wares - to create new software and share it with people. Awful lot of start-up app developers, some of them creating useless crap, and some creating really cool fun apps. If you don't want to go through 
