Followup to my earlier post about my HP Mini 1000 and Ubuntu Netbook Remix:

I found the time, got the proprietary Broadcom wireless drivers working, and installed Chrome with AdThwart. Now I'm sitting around using my netbook with the TV in the background.

For my admittedly geeky needs, the netbook does the "casual web browsing" job reasonably well, but it's hardly genius. The screen is just too small for many things, even with the optimizations that the Ubuntu Remix adds. I can't just rotate the screen 90 degrees, and several precious lines of screen real-estate are wasted relative to the full-screen view on an iPhone/iPad.

The stupid fan won't stop running, versus the dead quiet of something like an iPad. Also, the battery on this thing isn't good for all that long, while an iPad could run from the moment I get home to the moment I go to bed with charge to spare.

If I had my MacBook Air at home (it's back at the office), that would obviously be a huge improvement in every way, but I don't want to carry it back and forth every day, and I could never justify buying a second MBA, just to leave around at home on the off-chance I'd use it once in a while. Whereas a spare $300 Netbook, well why not? The keyboard is fine for writing this post, but for serious editing, it's far too cramped and uncomfortable, and the touchpad is maddening.


Back to the iPad:

I'm increasingly agreeing with the thought that this isn't a computer for us. It's an appliance for people who don't know their way around computers. Just like I've never felt a need to hack the software in my refrigerator or washing machine, the iPad customer base similarly doesn't want or care to have that extra flexibility or power. They just want something that "just works."

(What I'd really like to see are Apple or anybody else's private projections of the size and growth of this sort of web appliance market.)