On the minus side: Apple has made, and will continue to make, an intentionally crippled and limited device in the name of a better overall user experience.

I believe I was and still am entirely accurate; this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course. The recent concerns about address book privacy illustrate the concern perfectly; unrestricted access can easily lead to a very poor user experience.

Furthermore, when I said:

[The iPad will be] an unbelievable platform, and one which the vast majority of people will find satisfies their needs and exceeds all their expectations.

it turns out that I was more right than I expected to be – people are using iPads as their primary (!) machines, without so much as an external keyboard, for serious writing and content creation. It doesn’t satisfy all my needs, but it sure satisfies most of them, and exceeded most of my expectations.

What’s next? Well, iCloud and various other things have demonstrated that Apple’s goals point squarely at closer integration of all platforms, less reliance on the continual presence of a particular device itself, and a simpler user experience. Some of these things are fantastic – Photo Stream saves me a huge amount of time – and some of them not so much – Launchpad on the desktop is a sad joke. The App Store sandboxing and signing restrictions are very much a reasonable tradeoff (especially with non-App Store developer signatures in the offering for Mountain Lion), but splitting the APIs up so some of them are only available to App Store apps and some of them are only available (or at least useful) to non-App Store apps seems like a nightmare if it continues.

So: the iPad will continue to be a rampaging success. Apple TV will end up being less about a media box per se and more about a central hub for your devices to cross-connect (or maybe the Apple TV box will be /just/ a media interface, and the next generation of Airport devices will provide the smart hub). They’ll (maybe) figure out how to make iCloud not suck so much if you have a bunch of machines connected to the same account all on a local network. Xcode will continue to be an amazingly headachy IDE wrapped around a progressively more impressive compiler. Other businesses will continue to violently misunderstand what Apple is doing. They’ll continue to do unpleasant, walled-garden things in the name of a delightful-but-controlled user experience. I’ll keep using Apple products, and a Linux box, and a Windows box (but I’m probably not going to upgrade to W8 any time soon).

And I’ll hope that legislation doesn’t cause the internet to crumble out from under me in the meantime.

As with many products before, I fall somewhere in the middle.

On the plus side: It looks like a beautiful piece of hardware; every report I have read says that using it is a dream come true to any fan of the various iTouches. Fast, integrated, smooth, and with beautiful user interface decisions; top of the line hardware and (more polish on) groundbreaking software combine to make an unbelievable platform, and one which the vast majority of people will find satisfies their needs and exceeds all their expectations.

On the minus side: Apple has made, and will continue to make, an intentionally crippled and limited device in the name of a better overall user experience. While I wholeheartedly agree with their goals – make it accessible to the common man! – it is simply not what I, as a power user who is otherwise well in the target market, need in many respects.

Any number of minor concessions would solve this problem for me – and these are the same issues I have with any “trusted computing” sort of platform. It is not my best interests that Apple is trying to protect here, either as a developer or as an individual user. It is theirs, and it is not in their best interests to allow me to, for instance, decide whose software I actually trust.

No, I’m not trying to run Linux on the thing. It runs a perfectly acceptable *NIX operating system already, and in fact has a fantastic GUI (for almost every purpose) and software installation procedure (for almost every case) already. I just want to run my instant messenger and Pages. Even just the ability to background one application (with – yes, I realize this – the appropriate time and attention put in to making the experience smooth and complete) would make a huge difference in the overall usability.

I’d really like to run Processing on it. It’s just such a perfect platform for art-programming, and there’s nothing else quite like Processing for that.

But that’s all. I don’t want a pony.