Even creators must consume most forms of Art. Musicians watch movies; woodcarvers leaf through photo-journals, dancers rarely compose their own music. Ergo, th

Even creators must consume most forms of Art. Musicians watch movies; woodcarvers leaf through photo-journals, dancers rarely compose their own music. Ergo, the machine that a hundred creators are most likely to have in common, is one that consumes well. It seems the only thing we should logically expect is consumption and popularity to go hand in hand. But what exactly about the iPad acts as a break on creation? It isn't suited to composing and editing large blocks of text out-of-the-box; but only a couple forms of Art require that. Notably, the iPad is an arguably better machine for the creation of every art you explicitly called out, save coding. Does a cook need a keyboard and mouse in the kitchen? Seems a quick-reference that can sit in a recipe-book-holder and doesn't require putting down the butcher knife would be welcome. Wouldn't a dancer be better off with a machine that is easily picked up, put down, carried through a routine at half-speed and can naturally scrub through an instructional video? (My wife has already used my iPad to do exactly this.) Wouldn't a singer suitably benefit from an iPad on a music stand, showing instant pitch-feedback (via its microphone) and live-scrolling note chart? And clearly drawing is more-easily done on a tablet than with a mouse. As a big fan of creation, I'm downright excited that such a device has come to market that gets more cruft out of the way and brings computing to the natural habitats of other artists. That only developers with serious tools can code for it, and only at Apple's pleasure certainly isn't ideal. But that isn't so huge a roadblock and the up-side is that we're enabling all these other arts.