I'm a nerd's nerd. After the dot-com bust I used to collect SGI, DEC and Sun hardware. I cut my teeth on a Commodore 64 and also VAX VMS (in a DECNET cluster)

I'm a nerd's nerd. After the dot-com bust I used to collect SGI, DEC and Sun hardware. I cut my teeth on a Commodore 64 and also VAX VMS (in a DECNET cluster). I built my own PCs from 1992 through 2007. I work currently as a data warehousing consultant. My primary computer at home is now an iPad 2. Yes, I have a computer with a 27" display and tons of memory and four cores and a GPU suitable for playing new games, but it doesn't matter much because it's been collecting an awful lot of dust. As long as I can get my paws on another one, my parents are getting one as a joint Mother's/Father's day gift, because I doubt they'd touch their iMac much anymore. "I think we'll need a new input method in the coming proliferation of touch ui based devices." I don't. I type at 80-90% of the speed as a physical keyboard. And the thing that slows me down is having to switch keyboard pages for numbers and symbols -- otherwise I'm probably closer to 95% of my typing sped. I bang out frighteningly long emails on an iPad with no loss of efficiency. If it was bad, I wouldn't hesitate to go to my desk that's less than twenty feet away. The only thing that solves the input problem is a physically larger space for a larger virtual keyboard, and improvements to autocompletion algorithms and dictionaries. And time -- aren't there people who can type at furious rates on a Blackberry? There are, but they weren't that fast on Day 1. Can I program on an iPad? No. Actually, I can't do a lot of things on the iPad, but all those things are what I consider "work" -- I don't do image retouching to relax, nor do I relax by entering metadata for media, write applications, nor model databases. For everything I do that I consider "play", the iPad does all of it. Brilliantly. Computers are for work. Tablets are for play. Most people's computing tasks are in the latter category, and for that reason, tablets (or at least the iPad) will succeed. This isn't coming from a septuagenarian either -- I'm barely in my 30s.