The amount of traffic generated here by all mention of the iPhone/iPad or the App Store is quite remarkable. Sure, it's a closed platform, but so are things like Xbox, PSP, Nintendo DS, Nokia, Blackberry, Kindle, etc. These manufacturer can also arbitrarily reject your apps and control what you do on them, and worse, you typically have to buy an SDK costing $5000 or $10000 if you want to develop for them. Why don't any of these other manufacturers generate such vitriol?

Everyone is acting as if Apple have a monopoly on portable devices. If they did, all the criticism would be valid, and they'd be under very close scrutiny from the regulators for anything which looks like an anticompetive practice.

Apple obviously have a huge slice of the MINDSHARE on portable devices, but unless and until that translates to such a dominant marketshare that it excludes anyone else from entering the market it's all moot and Apple are free to do whatever they want, just as all the other manufacturers are.

Honestly, if you really dislike Apple so much, the best thing you can do is shut up! All this controversy over such a non-issue is just playing into Apple's hands and raising awareness of the iPad prior to its launch.

I must admit I'm a bit confused where all this vitriol about Apple being Big Brother is coming from.

Remotely removing apps you've already bought? No, Apple have never done that, and are very unlikely to, if they even can. You're thinking of Amazon I suspect. All they're doing is changing what is for sale through their store (just like when Tesco decides to stop stocking a particular line on their shelves).

The fact that you can't run arbitrary software on the iPhone? The iPhone isn't, and never was, sold as a general purpose computer. It's an appliance, and no different from any one of a myriad of other closed platforms (eg. Wii, DS, PSP, Nokia, etc.) where you can only run approved software. Are they all Big Brother as well?

In actual fact, the iPhone is a lot MORE OPEN than many devices. You can play music on it ripped from any CD or downloaded from any MP3 site, you can run any standards compliant Web 2.0 web app, play any standards compiant MPEG4 video on it, developers can very easily create and distribute apps for it without having to pay $5000 or $10000 for an SDK, etc.

Sure, you can do the same sort of thing on most other devices now, but that certainly didn't use to be the case. The success of the iPod and iPhone have actually done a HUGE amount to open up mobile platforms over the very closed and proprietary world we used to be in just 2 or 3 years ago.

And finally, don't forget that nothing is forcing anyone to buy from Apple. There's plenty of healthy competition from all sorts of other vendors, depending on exactly what kind of device you're after. So why exactly should Apple be singled out as being so evil?

Hey, you know what? iSuppli should supply a bag of bits just like a Tesco caesar salad kit and then anybody who wants to can make their own iPad and everyone's happy.

I'm sure if you look at the numbers then, yes, relatively more professional photographers will be using Macs and more accountants using Windows. That's not to say people using Macs are inherently "better" in any way, that you can't use a Mac and still take crap photos, or that you can't use Windows and produce outstanding results. Nor does it mean you can't use a Mac to do accounts come to that. There's so much convergence between the platforms that you can do anything with any modern computer. Which you choose is just a matter of personal preference, just as which make of car you drive is. The whole debate is just a wee bit boring.

So let's get this right, you have to be tricked into downloading and running a dodgy program that somebody emails you or you download from a pr0n site AND you have to confirm that you want to install it on your iPhone and that's a big security flaw?? Why is this even news?

As a consumer, I would far rather pay a bit more for quality than have everything forced down to the level of the gutter press and be drowned in advertising. My time spent reading it is worth FAR more than the £10 or £15 it costs to buy a book. (That ought to be true for most people, even if you're on the minimum wage and a very fast reader!)

If this is a sign of the publishers being able to stand up to inexorable downward pressure on price and quality that the Amazons and Tescos and Wallmarts of the world exert then that can only be a good thing in my opinion.

This looks like it could be a VERY interesting consumer device.

Sure, tablets in one form or another have been around for ages, but they were the kind of thing spotty faced geeks might play with for a bit and soon get bored with because they couldn't do anything useful with them, not the sort of thing your wife or g/f or kids or mom will be lusting after and putting top of their Christmas lists for the next few years, and trust me, they WILL lust after the iPad. Big time. Minimalist styling and a silky smooth design that fits smoothly in the hand is EXACTLY what they want. Better start saving now...

"Only a big iPod Touch"... right. So what from a marketing perspective is wrong with that? Any idea exactly how many iPods are out there, and how many millions and millions of people are already familiar with the interface? Not to mention 100,000 apps available for it from day one.

No camera and video iChat? This is the 1st gen device, they're here for the long haul. And that's before you factor in things like eBooks and micropayments for magazine subscriptions.

I too was a bit underwhelmed when I first saw the specs, but the more I think about it the more convinced I am this will be HUGE and that in 3 or 4 years the iPad will be as ubiquitous as iPods are today.

Well, DbD have a nice poster, I'll give them that, but they're not actually correct in most respects. You can run free software - no shortage of free apps on the AppStore. Books and music aren't DRM'd (eg. they're using the open ePub book standard, and Apple managed to persuade the music labels to let them sell non DRM'd music a while ago now). Apple have never remotely deleted anything as far as I'm aware. And sharing copyrighted material is illegal, right? (Assuming that by "sharing" they mean "copying" - if you want to lend your iPad to your mate so they can read the latest book you downloaded then I'm sure no-one's going to go out there and stop you.)

Hey, it's not just kids who enjoy looking up naughty words in dictionaries!

I've got a leather bound copy of a dictionary from 1749 and it's quite fun to see what words that lists, eg.

"DIL'DO [contracted from the Italian diletto, q.d. a Woman's Delight, or of our Word Dally q.d. a Thing to play withal] Penis Succadaneous, called in Lombardy, Passatempo."

Hours of amusement :-)

Wasn't this the woman who deliberately lied and perjured herself at her original trial, which pissed everyone there off so much that a punitive award was imposed against her? Remember, the original $2m fine was decided on by a JURY, not by the judge or the RIAA.

I agree, it's a pain to have to register and pay for viewing online newspapers and magazines, but it's also a pain to have to pay for other things, like DVDs and food and alcohol and cars and toys and stuff.

I'm no keener than anyone else to rush out and pay for online news when I can get it for free but long term, if publishers do manage to find a way to charge readers that's convenient and easy and not too extortionate then that would actually be a Good Thing.

If you're going to employ a good journalist to work full time to get off their backside to research a story, talk to people, and check their facts then clearly they need to be compensated somehow. A race to the bottom where everything is free, and the only way to make money is keep costs to a bare minimum by regurgitating other people's drivel and covering your web site with Flash ads, is in no-one's best interest.

You're absolutely right. Google used to provide far and away the best quality of search results but now they just return spam, page after page of price comparison sites or auto-generated "blogs" that are just a vehicle for placing more ads. The ads on those sham web sites are invariably placed with Google, so no surprise Google doesn't object to them coming top of the search results.

"Excuse me? How naive do you think the readers here are?

It is the banks' CUSTOMERS that will end up paying the taxes, same as the customers pay for everything else that the bank pays out."

Well, yes, of course, but that's good isn't it? The banks are businesses. They're supposed to make a profit, and pay tax on those profits. But the investment banks' customers aren't you and me on the high street, but large corporations, other banks, even foreign governments around the world. They bring billions and billions of foreign earnings to the UK and to the exchequer each year, even with last year's bailout (most of which has been paid back now) they're still HUGE net contributors to the economy.

As for whether £25K bonuses are huge and should be stopped or not, that all depends on your point of view. There are plenty of junior to middling IT workers in the City who might be on an "£80K package", which they know will be paid as £55K basic and £20K-30K bonus at the end of the year depending on how well their bit of the bank does. That salary is what they plan their life around, their mortgage etc. is based on the expectation of an £80K salary (or rather, if they're prudent they'll base it on £75K and treat anything above that as a genuine "bonus").

You may or may not think £75K for a good software developer is quite generous, but suddenly taking away 25 to 35% of anyone's salary because you're blaming them for something they personally have no control or involvement in is a little bit harsh in my opinion.