I think it's possible people will get real work done on an iPad, but it just requires that they change some or many of their paradigms of production. Like any n

I think it's possible people will get real work done on an iPad, but it just requires that they change some or many of their paradigms of production. Like any new tool, it may enable new forms of creation at the expense of some older ones, but that doesn't mean the older ones disappear. > The iPad may well be - and probably is - the future of content consumption, web browsing, gaming, and perhaps television viewing. There's a difference between that though, and the future of computing. I think this is a great point, and couldn't agree with you more. In the midst of media frenzies, where the echo chamber (including company marketting departments) starts throwing around terms without regard to the deeper implications of them, it can be easy to forget that "computing" is a lot of things. When someone is writing a novel in a nice word processor or emailing photos to a friend, that's part of computing. So is designing a video game, programming a utility software, and editting music. "Computing" is a lot of things, and it certainly doesn't just mean crunching numbers in a programmable calculator, as it used to way back in the day. I think that's a part of what's bothering people when the iPad is referred to as the future of computing: it implies that all the other stuff that the iPad omits isn't computing. But to say that the iPad has no place in the future of computing is to make the same mistake in reverse (you didn't say that, but a lot of people have made comments in that vein). From my perspective, saying the iPad is the future of computing is no worse than saying that some new octo-core, power-guzzling chip is the future of computing, or that voice interface is the future of computing. That chip won't be so nice in a low-power netbook, and I wouldn't want to dictate my code to the computer when I could just type it. But all these technological innovations and products have a place in the ever-changing landscape that is computing. And by providing more devices that sit in different niches and excel at different things, with either broad capabilities or limited ones, we are succeeding in the goal of expanding what is possible within the sum total of activities that is "computing." As long as we keep doing that, we keep adding to that nebulous idea that is the future of computing.