It’s no MagicSlate

I have long dreamed of a neat, small computer which I called the MagicSlate and I was interested to read that this was one of the names Apple registered for their slate device. I even wrote a story about its developers. But that’s another, er, story.

But the iPad – it sounds like a sanitary towel for the late 20th Century, by the way – is no MagicSlate. It’s just a big iPhone. Without the phone. And not even a USB port as far as I can tell.

Steve Jobs has also dissed netbook users by saying they are “just cheap laptops”. Almost everyone I know has a netbook or has bought one for someone. And sometimes you need a cheap laptop and Apple laptops are not cheap. Apple could not make a netbook because there’s not enough profit in the hardware at those prices. According to BBC News his Steveness said:

“Netbooks aren’t better at anything – they’re slow and have low quality displays.”

Well my £245 netbook (running OS X, incidentally) has an LED-backlit display. Er, a bit like the iPad. And so much is on the web (and in ‘the cloud’) now that processing power just doesn’t count for that much any more.

One thing seems certain though – if the iPad is running on Apple’s own CPU, it won’t easily get hacked and ported to another make of device any time soon, if ever. But then why would you want to?