I expected it to be $999. And to think, the most expensive 3G model is over a hundred dollars less than that. Times, they are indeed a-changing.

It’s always interesting to watch how different people respond to new information, particularly if it’s contrary to what they previously knew. Some are open to change and will say, “Oh? I didn’t know that. I wonder what else I don’t know. I’m going to go study it.” Others get defensive and occasionally hostile. They pride themselves on knowing and cannot bring themselves to admit (or even recognize) there are things in the world they do not understand.

There’s no denying that the iPad has potential, especially now that developers simply have more room to play with, both on the screen and in the hardware. The problem is that it has almost nothing BUT potential at this point. It very much seems to have been introduced before the software was finished, so they hacked wallpaper support and floaty menus onto the existing iPhone OS and dumped it on the iPad just in time for the keynote. It’s nice that they made a bigger iPod touch for those who wanted one, but it just doesn’t seem like enough of a change to warrant its own separate product. The iPhone didn’t rely entirely on third-party apps to make it successful; it made its own way in the world first. In contrast, the iPad is going to need the charity of iPhone developers to give it anything resembling a “killer app” outside of the niche e-book market. The issue here is NOT, I think, that the iPhone OS isn’t good — because it absolutely is — but that the iPad doesn’t have anything new that makes it “special”.

Even third-party multitasking alone (or, alternatively, Apple-vetted third-party background processes that can be turned on or off by the user) would have accomplished this. It would’ve said, “hey, this is the same iPhone OS you already know and love, but grown up for a grown-up device”. Now, there’s a distinct possibility that this could show up in iPhone OS 4.0…but by then, the iPad will already have earned a reputation for being introduced without it. Apple could’ve avoided the damage and made themselves and the iPad look far better just by waiting until it was ready for prime time.

(As for background processes, I realize that sounds scary, but only if you think of them the same way you do on Mac OS X, as mysterious, invisible daemons or little icon gremlins sitting in your menu bar. What if Apple provided a visual, touchable UI space just for them, sort of like Dashboard? Perhaps you’d pull down on the status bar when you’re in the home screen, and unfurl a sheet of icons or very simple widgets that let you turn on your background IM service or background GPS navigator? There are plenty of use cases that are sorta-kinda covered by Apple’s PNS, but…well, to me at least, PNS has always seemed to be a kludgy stopgap measure at best.)