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Hmmm… This from Good Morning Silicon Valley.

Thought you were done hearing rumors about the tablet Apple is secretly developing? No such luck. Less than a week after the iPad was unveiled, there is already talk that a larger, more versatile sibling is in the works. Mind you, it’s just talk — a thinly sourced tidbit relayed by TechCrunch with the requisite grain of salt and appropriate hedging. But the gist of it is that Apple is well along on a second tablet with Intel inside, a screen possibly as large as 15.4 inches, and, instead of the iPhone OS, a version of Mac OS X, making for a more open device. MG Siegler suggests we keep an eye on Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June to see if Apple offers a peek at the upcoming OS X 10.7. Should the new version include some significant multitouch features, he says, that would bolster prospects for a more Mac-like tablet.

Actually, they could just rip the screen off my MacBook Air and use that.

Well, it will if this can be believed.

Mission Repair, a company that fixes broken Apple products, apparently got their hands on some iPad parts. Their pictures showed off the internal frame, which curiously enough has a small hole on the top of the frame.

When the Mission Repair team took a camera out of a MacBook and placed it inside the iPad’s top hole, it fight right in. You can see a comparison of the MacBook camera and the iPad slot in the image above.

No, this isn’t about standard paper sizes, but the processor chip in the iPad.

I was puzzled that Apple had gone to the trouble and expense of doing custom silicon, and I’m still puzzled. So — according to this NYT report — are other observers.

But designing its own processors burdens Apple with additional engineering costs and potential product delays. It also forces the company to hire — and retain — experienced chip designers. Several who joined the company in 2008 after an acquisition have already left for a secretive start-up.

Though chip industry experts have yet to put the iPad through their customary rigorous tests, Apple’s demonstrations left them underwhelmed.

“I don’t see anything that looks that compelling,” said Linley Gwennap, a chip analyst at the Linley Group. “It doesn’t seem like something all that new, and, if it is, they are not getting far with it.”

Very thoughtful essay by Alex Payne.

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.

Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the “hacker era” of digital history. Now that consumers and traditional media understand the digital world, maybe there’s proportionally less need for freewheeling technological experimentation and platforms that allow for the same. Maybe the hypothetical mom doesn’t need a real computer. As long as real computers stick around for people who do need them, maybe there’s no harm in that.

Wherever we stand in digital history, the iPad leaves me with the feeling that Apple’s interests and values going forward are deeply divergent from my own. There’s nothing wrong with that; people make consumer decisions every day based on their values. If I don’t like the product that the iPad turns out to be once released, I’m free to simply not buy it. These things have a way of evolving, and I won’t preclude the possibility that Apple eventually addresses concerns about the openness of the device.

For now, though, I remain disturbed. The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. It’s not a future I want to bring into my home…

This is a lovely essay — and it attracted some interesting comments. What it illustrates is the gulf between the ‘consumer’ view of computing and the programmer’s perspective, where ‘freedom to tinker’ is of paramount importance.

One of the comments also makes an important point, namely that the dichotomy between ‘closed=safe’ and ‘open=vulnerable’ is a false one. The most insidious thing of all is a closed system that isn’t secure but which users believe is secure, because that leaves them open to hacking in a particularly unpleasant way. A bit like the false confidence that comes from using a bike-lock which you are told is unbreakable but which is, in fact, vulnerable to those who know how to break it.

FOOTNOTE: I found Alex’s essay via dive into mark, which has an equally thoughtful post about the iPad.

Interesting how low-budget it looks compared with the recent Jobs Keynotes.

I know, I know: it’s an old joke. But still funny.

After a big announcement, Steve Jobs often holds a ‘town hall’ meeting of Apple employees. Here’s an excerpt from Wired’s report of the latest one.

Jobs, characteristically, did not mince words as he spoke to the assembled, according to a person who was there who could not be named because this person is not authorized by Apple to speak with the press.

On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars.

About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.

The world, of course, includes Google, which last week in a somewhat more modest development bypassed Apple’s iPhone app blockade by unveiling an html5 version of Google Voice, which takes full advantage of mobile Safari on the iPhone. Wired.com found it to be an impressive variation of the app Apple has neither approved nor officially rejected.

And it is, of course, in keeping with Google’s stated view (Android app marketplace notwithstanding) that the future is really in web-based applications and not in mobile apps at all. Web-based applications of the sort html5 makes much more viable.

This morning’s Observer column.

WATCHING STEVE JOBS unveil the Apple iPad, what came to mind was something that Neil Postman, the most influential media critic since Marshall McLuhan, once said. Our future possibilities, Postman thought, lay on a spectrum bounded by George Orwell at one end, and by Aldous Huxley at the other: Orwell because he believed that we would be destroyed by the things we fear; Huxley because he thought that we would be undone by the things we love.

As the internet went mainstream, the Orwellian nightmare has evolved into a realistic possibility, because of the facilities the network offers for the comprehensive surveillance so vividly evoked in 1984. Governments everywhere have helped themselves to powers to read every email or text you've ever sent. And that's just the democracies; authoritarian regimes are far more intrusive.

Until recently, the Huxleian nightmare seemed a more distant prospect…

The nice thing about the iPad is that it has ignited this closed v. open argument across the net. Here, for example, is an impassioned piece by Fraser Speirs:

The people whose backs have been broken under the weight of technological complexity and failure immediately understand what’s happening here. Those of us who patiently, day after day, explain to a child or colleague that the reason there’s no Print item in the File menu is because, although the Pages document is filling the screen, Finder is actually the frontmost application and it doesn’t have any windows open, understand what’s happening here.

The visigoths are at the gate of the city. They’re demanding access to software. they’re demanding to be in control of their own experience of information. They may not like our high art and culture, they may be really into OpenGL boob-jiggling apps and they may not always share our sense of aesthetics, but they are the people we have claimed to serve for 30 years whilst screwing them over in innumerable ways. There are also many, many more of them than us.

People talk about Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field, and I don’t disagree that the man has a quasi-hypnotic ability to convince. There’s another reality distortion field at work, though, and everyone that makes a living from the tech industry is within its tractor-beam. That RDF tells us that computers are awesome, they work great and only those too stupid to live can’t work them.

The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get “real work” done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the “real work.”

It’s not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organizing the party.

Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.

If the iPad and its successor devices free these people to focus on what they do best, it will dramatically change people’s perceptions of computing from something to fear to something to engage enthusiastically with. I find it hard to believe that the loss of background processing isn’t a price worth paying to have a computer that isn’t frightening anymore.

And here’s John Murrell of Good Morning Silicon Valley

So I was chatting with my buddy and loyal Apple customer JP yesterday, and he asked me if I would be buying an iPad, and I said … wait, let me check the log … I said, “Oh, heavens no. Maybe some sort of slate, someday, but on an open system.” And it struck me that we’d had essentially the same exchange a few years back about the iPhone. Lovely as it may be, I just don’t want to confine myself to Apple’s walled garden. This is partly a philosophical thing, partly a preference for having the maximum number of options, and partly because I’m a tweaker by nature, and Apple products have never lent themselves to tweaking. No knock on Apple and no arguing with the success of its integrated approach. But for my purposes, Apple’s big contribution is to keep driving new ideas into the marketplace so they can find their way into gadgets for the rest of us.

In the case of the phone, I had a long wait before the arrival of the right handset with the right operating system on the right network (and by right, I of course mean right for me). Then the Droid showed up, and I became the very happy owner of a powerful, versatile pocket computer with an open operating system, a beautiful display and apps for everything I need. In the case of the tablet … well, it’s not a pressing issue for me due to certain constraints regarding disposable income, but the wait for worthy non-Apple contenders won’t be nearly as long. In its form factor and niche targeting, the iPad may be a bold business move for Apple, but it’s not the leap in technology and interface that the iPod and iPhone were. This time around, Apple doesn’t have any secret sauce. Competitive processors, touchscreens, operating systems and content services are already out there, and manufacturers have the pieces to start pushing iPad alternatives out the pipeline almost immediately — devices that will come equipped with the features missing from the Apple tablet and will let you roam outside the garden. But, I can hear the Apple fans saying, you’ll never have the cool design and elegant integration that comes out of a tightly controlled environment. Yep, that’s true … and that’s just fine with me. I have no trouble accepting that life outside the wall can be grittier than life inside. The freedom to choose is worth it.

Thanks to Andrew Laird for the link to Speirs.

Right on schedule!

Thanks to Gerard for the link.