Cult of Mac has come up with an interesting point of views about the newly born iPad which will reach consumers’ hands in about 3 months from now. Apple’s iPad is just another iPod Touch with 10-inch screen, but this is what most of us need from a computer. If you can use it to surf the Web, read email, listen to music, watch video, download books, read news papers and magazines or compose documents. That’s what a personal computer use for many of us. iPad, I think a lot of people are going to buy them. Here are two expert opinions which are not only interesting but also conflicting with each other:

Against: Tech author Rafe Colburn says:

General purpose computing is too complicated for most people anyway, and the iPad’s descendants along with similar competing products from other companies will offer an enticing alternative. So I see the death of the traditional, open personal computer as a likely occurrence.

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For:    On the hand, Facebook iPhone developer Joe Hewitt is extremely positive about the iPad’s closed system. To his mind it’s a major asset:

The one thing that makes an iPhone/iPad app “closed” is that it lives in a sandbox, which means it can’t just read and write willy-nilly to the file system, access hardware, or interfere with other apps. In my mind, this is one of the best features of the OS. It makes native apps more like web apps, which are similarly sandboxed, and therefore much more secure. On Macs and PCs, you have to re-install the OS every couple years or so just to undo the damage done by apps, but iPhone OS is completely immune to this.

The analyst Leander Kahney is in agreement with Hewitt who thinks that iPad is a cloud computer par excellence, and will likely be able to run almost any software we want on it, but it’ll be on a server somewhere and not on the iPad. Colburn though has noted this too, but thinks it to be counter productive leading to the death of the traditional, open personal computer as a likely consequence.          [Via Cultofmac]