I don’t know anyone that 9owns an iPad (do you?) I only know of a couple of people that said “Ooooo, I gotta have one” and I can’t even remember their names.

When the iPad was first announced, I wrote an email to my daughter (an illustrator whose husband is an illustrator and both of whom are rabid Mac-ites) and asked what market they were aiming at. I had hoped to start a conversation about it but my daughter just responded, “Kindle.” That’s where I think Apple’s problem with the iPad lies.

Remember the LISA? I do, it was among the first generation of graphically based interface machines. After selling only 100,000 units, Apple dropped the line in favor of the Mac XL. This was a wise move on Apple’s part but I have always wondered how that LISA community felt.

I owned one of the original iPod Shuffles. Actually, I owned three of them. The first two I owned (one of which was sent directly from Apple) were returned because they would not charge through a high speed USB port, which was on of their design features. On the third try, I got one that behaved about 90% of the time and the remainder of the time liked to crash and laugh at me. My wife finally broke down and bought me one of the next generation Shuffles that were in the inch-square format. I have to say that one finally lived up to the Apple billing.

And this is why I look at the iPad and scratch my head. Yeah, it looks neat and you can do finger-foo magic with it, but it only runs *one* app at a time? And the promo ads involved Apple engineers touting how it is going to change the face of computing? Hmm… I’ve heard that before.

Anyone own a Segway outside of DisneyWorld? Their designers were just as adamant about the ecological, people enhancing, gotta buy it goodness of the Segway (and it is a slick piece of gadgetry as I did get to ride one of the few I have seen – at DisneyWorld). But what else does the iPad do that will make it so much better than the other things in the Kindle market? Beats me….

I think the iPad should probably have been named the meToo….