Apple didn’t design the iPad to be for us. It’s not a “Netbook without a keyboard.” It’s not meant to be a multitasking, primary-use computer. You’re not meant to write novels on it, or use InDesign to design a newspaper, or edit a movie in iMovie. The iPad isn’t for us; it’s for everyone else.

Apple has clearly spent a lot of time on the iPhone OS user interface to allow it to lower the barrier of entry to computing to practically nothing. I can hand my 2-year-old son my iPhone and he figures out how to navigate the controls immediately. My mother, who can barely manage to turn on her iMac to compose an email is able to use my iPhone with little guidance. The iPhone was the first step in moving away from the desktop paradigm of computer use; the iPad is a second step. It’s ironic that Steve Jobs and Apple, who did so much to create and popularize and spread the desktop metaphor of computer use, are the same people working to overturn that metaphor and move the public to a new way of interacting with computers.

In ten years, we won’t even recognize the computers that we’ll be using. My son will be 12 years old, and he won’t be using a laptop or a desktop computer, except in some specialized uses. Mac OS X and Windows as we know them will be distant and obsolete technologies to him. His computing environment, ten years from now, will be some distant generation of the iPad. Speech recognition and multi-touch variants will be the primary ways of interacting with his digital devices. Technology evolves and improves rapidly. What we’re seeing with the iPhone and now the iPad is nothing more than the next generation of computing devices. It’s going to be exciting to see it evolve.

The iPad also lends itself to a global audience. Apple has already figured out a better way for Chinese language characters to be entered, using the multi-touch trackpad on their newest laptops. This kind of data entry, using your fingers to draw characters rather than a keyboard, will of course be ported to the iPad. Just because the most efficient way of data entry for an Arabic character-based language is via a physical keyboard doesn’t mean that that is true for a large chunk of the rest of the world.

So you can titter and joke all you want about the name and how it conjures up images of feminine hygiene products. Apple doesn’t care. People laughed at the iPod name also and look how big of a failure that was. Eventually the iPad will gain some multitasking functionality in a future iPad OS version and it’ll be more palatable to the geeks. But until then, Apple will be selling millions of these things to average users who simply don’t know and don’t care about the “missing” features about which you are whinging.

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The most significant change is the to the Mac mini, which now sports a Firewire 800 port, five USB ports, and can take up to 4GB of RAM. I’m also really liking the price point on the 24-inch iMac.

The Mac Pro, however, remains expensive when compared to the rest of the Apple line and is really only appropriate for power users, photographers, and video editors.

I’d still like to see a subnotebook or tablet from Apple, but these speed bumps are a decent product refresh, especially in light of how poorly computer sales have been and will be for the next 12-18 months as we all weather this recession/depression.

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