
Facebook iPhone developer Joe Hewitt;
is extremely positively about the iPad’s closed system. To his mind it’s a major asset:
“The one thing that makes an iPhone/iPad app “closed” is that it lives in a sandbox, which means it can’t just read and write willy-nilly to the file system, access hardware, or interfere with other apps. In my mind, this is one of the best features of the OS. It makes native apps more like web apps, which are similarly sandboxed, and therefore much more secure. On Macs and PCs, you have to re-install the OS every couple years or so just to undo the damage done by apps, but iPhone OS is completely immune to this.”
I agree with Hewitt, the iPad is a clever cloud computer, and we will likely be able to run almost any software, but it’ll be on a server and not on the iPad.
No matter what anyone says, it is the future. Get with the program.