I love Apple.
          Not the fruit, the computer company.  It’s something about the way their machines are easy to use.  That they tend to avoid viruses, and that I don’t have to constantly be telling Norton what to allow or block.  Something about how printers and cameras and things tend to simply work, without complicated drivers and things.  Oh, and all their customer service representatives are based in North America.  With English as a first language.
          For a former Dell customer, this is as close to  heaven as you can get.
          However, my love affair with Apple is not idyllic.  For starters, Apple has an irritating tendency to make my products obsolete approximately five minutes after I’ve fallen in love with them.  They consider my trusty 2006 MacBook to be “vintage,” and I’m pretty sure none of their current “Geniuses” have ever seen a first generation iPod Nano like mine (bare-bones memory, but still more than any sported by my computers until then).
          Like the rest of the civilized world, I have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the iPad.  With its starting price of $499 and its impressive list of features and capabilities, I was secretly hoping it would be a half-price laptop replacement.
         Today, I happened to be in the mall, and the Apple store pulled me in with all the efficiency of a black hole.  I thought it would be more crowded, but to my shock, not only was I able to walk in the door, but I was able to find an empty demo iPad right in the front of the store, just waiting for me.

          The rumors are true.  It is a gorgeous device.  Somehow it feels silky in your hands, with a slightly curved back, an unbelievably trim profile, and a glossy screen just waiting to respond to your most subtle command.
          And therein lies the problem.  That damn screen.
          It’s so responsive that surfing the web is a dream.  This is a device meant to consume content.  But if any of you had in mind this might be an appropriate machine to create content, be assured that it is not.
          The iPad lacks a traditional keyboard, but when turned horizontally, has a virtual keyboard.  It looks really cool in all the Apple ads.
          But it is completely useless.  You cannot use it to type anything of substance.
          If you’re looking to text, this might be your thing.  But if you’re a writer or anyone who might need to send a serious email, forget it.
         The iPad’s miraculous touch screen is so sensitive that you cannot rest your fingers on the keyboard’s home keys without it registering it as typing.  Add Apple’s auto-fill feature, and you suddenly cannot type anything.  I spent five minutes trying to type the sentence about the small red fox jumping over the lazy brown dog, but I never even got one word to come out correctly.  There is no tactile component to the keyboard at all, so in order to type, you have to be looking at your hands.  Most of us who’ve grown up typing look at the screen while we work, not at our hands.  This model is simply unworkable.
          Once you consider that, in addition to the keyboard woes, the iPad will not run multiple applications simultaneously, has no USB port, and is unable to print, its potential usefulness as anything approaching a laptop replacement is practically nil.
          I say all this with great sadness.  I wanted to like the iPad enough to buy one.  It is a streamlined object of beauty and functionality.  But I can’t figure out what it does, other than possess a gorgeous screen and amazing advertising.