Didn’t read the article, but the iPad was my gateway drug into the Apple orchard. It was quite literally my first ever Apple product, and I had actually purcha

Didn’t read the article, but the iPad was my gateway drug into the Apple orchard. It was quite literally my first ever Apple product, and I had actually purchased it as a gift for the older people in my family. They had almost never touched computers, but they immediately took to the iPad, after an initial trepidation from fear of accidentally breaking an expensive thing. After assuring that there was nothing they could do to damage the iPad save for physically smashing it with a hammer, they were using it all the time. Watching them enjoy it impressed me with its accessibility and simplicity and I just had to try developing for it. So I torrented a VMWare image for macOS (Lion at the time) and started dabbling in it. My host machine was running Windows 8 and it was the first time I had ever used macOS. Gradually I began to notice that I was spending more time in the Mac VM than in Windows and loving every minute it. My next personal computer was a MacBook and I’ve never felt the need to go back to PCs yet. So yeah. The iPad was to computers what the Wii was to games. In fact, I think it’s gotten unnecessarily complicated since then, with its mystery meat menus and arcane gestures and removal of Dock labels etc. On one hand it should have stayed true to its original purpose, bringing basic computing to the computer-shy masses, but on the other a simplified OS would be a painful waste of the iPad’s beautiful hardware. Maybe it’s time to offer “Casual” and “Pro” UI modes in iPadOS?