Speaking of touch screen, watching the two vids on Engadget http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/15/windows-phone-7-series-hands-on-and-impressions/ and boy either the user isn't touching the screen when moving his fingers around or it's missing a crap lot of touch gestures. That can't be right!?!?!

I must be lucky. I use MobileMe to sync everything across an iMac, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, MacMini, iPhone and iTouch and have never had any problems.

I wondered this. I'm a Mac user and I see a lot of Macs but they are mostly the base-level MacBooks - hardly high-end.

It's not true and that's the difference between Apple launching iPod/iPhone and Google launching their phone. Only the naive would believe Google didn't benefit from Schmidt being on Apple's board during much of the iPhones planning and development.

Yeah, particularly as Apple also had representatives on the Board of fellow manufacturers of such devices so were well aware of long term product strategies before they recused themselves from Board meetings. Oh wait...

I honestly struggle to find an example where self regulation, where it is even possible, has not been abused. Public companies have a responsibility to shareholders - like it or lump it. How many shareholders really take an interest in the ethics or morals of the board as long as the dividends keep rolling in? As for Government 'interference', do you think it's in USG's interest to regulate Microsoft's potential courting of China as market? I'd wager that USG would be more interested in the possibility of exploiting whatever relationship Microsoft may be able to build.

I'm no fan of Microsoft but whatever your ideology or beliefs, commercial realities remain and China is, and will continue to be, big business. Kudos to Google perhaps, but if I were a Microsoft shareholder I would want Microsoft to be wanting to make inroads in to this market. Morals do not pay the bills. As an individual would you (not the parent) be happy to content to contribute half your income for the rest of your life if it meant China was truly free and democratic? I doubt many would.

Are you serious? You're talking about a company who have moved to industry standard hardware (80x86 - not that PPC wasn't a standard), spent time developing BootCamp, along with a stack of Windows drivers for bespoke/weird Apple hardware to run Windows, who have their fingers in an awful lot of open source projects and regularly contribute to such projects and publish the source code for the changes they've made on such open projects. You think they are suddenly going to move towards a completely close platform on the Mac like? Reducing the software base for that platform to, what?, perhaps 1% of what it currently is now? You seriously believe this???

I do not think the iPad is for me but I, as I'm sure Apple is, is confident that there is a big audience for a device where text input is minimal (and where an onscreen keyboard suffices) but where the user is doing a lot of reading (ebooks, browsing etc), watching movies, listening to music, email but where they don't want to worry about virii and malware. This potentially looks like viable platform for such people.

I may be wrong but Apple don't seem to be pushing this is a computer, it's always a "device". Semantics perhaps but I see a distinction. Perhaps FSF would like to rag on the modern speak'n'spell equivalents. Maybe E.T. would have got home quicker if it was an open platform?

Their media devices certainly use open formats. The iTouch and iPhone play MP3, AAC, many AVIs and MP4s files. The default mechanism (iTunes) in which you put such media on their devices is proprietary because it's tied in to the media library system used by the device but anybody who uses Air Sharing (for iPod/iPhone) will confirm you can use both devices as a wifi accessible drive and drop files and folders and play that media on the device.

Quite frankly you sound unreasonably reasonable. Can't your throw some demands in that Apple should be made to change or that what that do is unacceptable? This whole choice and free decision-making thing will destroy /. if it catches on. Personally I can live with the restraints Apple have placed on my iPhone but if I decide I can't I'll jailbreak.I was hoping the iPad would to be closer to the OSX paradigm than the iPhone OS paradigm, that is, open. However being realistic, unless Apple had created an entirely touch interface for OSX just for the iPad, which didn't require every program to be rebuilt, I think what they did was the safe move. Whether it was a smart move only time will tell.

Mac-wise I've had a PowerBook G4 (12"), MacBook and MacBook Pro 15" and yeah, when you carry a laptop everywhere (and a lot of work crap too), you have no idea how much difference a fraction of an inch and a pound of weight makes when your laptop is with you from 7am when you leave the house til whatever time it is you crawl home.

I got my Macbook Air a few months ago and, unlike any other laptop I've had before, I take it everywhere. You know why? Because it's no bother to keep it my my backpack all the time and that's kind of the point.

Dude, for the record I learnt 6510 on the 64 and 68000 on an Amiga where hundreds and hundreds of lines of assembler rarely produced more than a couple of dozen kilobytes of code, but its not raw code that takes up in a modern OS.