Snippet: A Slow-Roast Revolution ☇

The other day, I came across Andy Ihnatko’s thoughts on using the iPad for desktop-grade purposes, and I have to say that I agree. I’m considering (eventually) an iMac or Mac mini for my next Mac, and the MacBook Pro and even MacBook Air don’t really interest me. Right now, my MacBook Pro is plenty powerful, but I find myself using it less and less, especially since I got a third-generation iPad:

Two things have happened since then. First, iOS app developers have become much bolder. On Day One, they were writing apps that treated the iPad as a content consumption device. By the time the iPad 2 was released, they thought of it as a machine that could handle many functions of a ‘real’ computer, during those specific instances when it’s just not worth hauling around a full-sized notebook.

Today, more and more developers are confident that the iPad is indeed a real computer, and are expressing that confidence by making desktop-class iOS apps – with Apple leading the way, of course. The new iPad edition of iPhoto isn’t just competitive with the desktop version, the tactile nature of the iPad makes it superior to most of the available consumer-grade image editors for Mac OS and Windows.