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The iPad conversation moves into high gear with open-platform proponents fearing the Apple device's closed nature and worrying that it privileges media consumption over creation, while iPad optimists suggest that it will evolve into a great creative device as well -- and iPad inevitabilists argue that, good or bad, the simplified computing platform will put an end to computing's tinkerers' paradise. It's one of those times when the discussions of media's future on the one hand and computing's future on the other blend into one continuous debate.

The heart of the anti-iPad position remains profoundly political. The headline of John Naughton's Observer column says it all: "Apple + iPad + Huxley = Orwellian nightmare."

For business, however, the iPad excites lust as well as fear. David Carr's Monday column, "To Deliver, iPad Needs Media Deals" asks, "This is a device for consuming media, not creating it. So are the media providers ready to deliver?"

Jeff Jarvis responds:

@jeffjarvis @carr2n obliquely hits on iPad's biggest weakness for media companies: disintermediating the relationship w/ readers.

@jeffjarvis ... for in media, the value will be in the relationship. Content is mostly the magnet that enables that connection.

@jeffjarvis Maybe this is what bothers me: Does the iPad bring back content consumption & cut off creation, interaction, relationships? We'll see.

If the iPad optimists are right and Apple has really hit on the computing equivalent of the automatic transmission, as John Gruber makes the analogy, then Carr's headline might perhaps have better been phrased, "To Deliver, Media Need iPad Deals."

With Steven Colbert slipping an iPad (or mock-iPad) from his jacket pocket on the Grammy show, it does seem that love for Apple's latest creation is more widely distributed among the general public than among either media junkies or geeks.
 
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The jury is still divided down the middle. But an impressive array of critical firepower turned on Apple's new iPad over the past 48 hours, some with a focus on the device itself, others with more thoughts on its impact on journalism and the media business.

Here's the cream of the commentary.

Josh Benton, Nieman Lab: "So it’s called the iPad: Five thoughts on how it will (and won’t) change the game for news organizations"":

The iPad, as we know it today, doesn’t change any of the fundamental economics of news commerce. On the iPhone, you can sell news apps through the App Store; you can upsell specific pieces of content to people within your apps; and you can sell advertising within those applications...On the iPad, you can...do those same three things. The only thing that has changed is the size, and that big beautiful screen. Will people who weren’t willing to buy news on an iPhone be sold on the idea just because the text is bigger and the photos are prettier? I’d be surprised.

Judy Sims: "Keep the print guys away from the iPad app"":

They will want to lay out pages the way they do in a newspaper or magazine. They will want to charge per article or figure out a subscription model that can be included in their ABC numbers. They will want to keep reader interaction, community and linking to a minimum. In short, they will kill any chances of real innovation.

Luke Hayman, "Five ways the iPad will change magazine design":

People will start subscribing to certain i-mags just for the ads alone...I predict the return of long-form journalism....What's the point of print? I think that the publications that end up enduring will be the ones that exploit what print alone can do. The best ones will be things that you want to save, not toss in the recycling bin. They'll project a sense of craftsmanship and permanence.
 
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This morning, a bevy of live blogs streamed each screen shot of the new iPad out to detail-hungry Appleheads, while a thousand tweets mocked the name for its menstrual suggestivity. Initial reaction was divided, and by the end of the day, so were the critics.

At Slate, for instance, Farhad Manjoo fell in love with the ebony slab. Others felt let down: No camera! Onscreen keyboard! It's just a cancerous iPod Touch! It doesn't have Flash! (Why not? What the hell is Flash? Best in-depth explanation is from John Gruber's Daring Fireball earlier this week.)

@sivavaid So the IPad is severely crippled tablet computer with Atari 400 keyboard. If it succeeds, age of personal computer is over.

The New York Times was all over the Apple event, with veteran tech correspondent John Markoff manning the Twitter stream:

@markoff my theory on steve jobs: the world's best packager and the world's best sense of technology timing...

@markoff a keyboard dock. he cracked the code... the laptop is dead....

Times media columnist David Carr wrote, "the question remains whether Mr. Jobs is building a bridge or a gallows for various media industries." Either way, Carr made a breathless case for the Big Dealness of it all: "Today represented an inflection point in digital history and a reset button for the industry....the game changed today."

The paper's gadget reviewer, David Pogue, was quite positive on the iPad overall, but hedged more on the significance of the thing:

It looks like Apple really has created something new. Criticisms of “Like a laptop” and “a big iPod Touch” don’t really do justice to the possibilities...Overall, the iPad seems like a dream screen for reading and watching--at some loss of convenience in creating...It may change an industry or two, or it may not. It may introduce a new category -- something between phone and laptop -- or it may not. And anyone who claims to know what will happen will wind up looking like a fool.

The Times itself was front and center in Apple's demo; it appears to be one of Apple's key media partners for the new device. C.W. Anderson raised the inevitable questions:

@chanders .@palafo @markoff @brianstelter is it unfair of me to think that there is absolutely *no* way that the NYT can provide unbiased ipad covg?

Times editor Patrick LaForge responded:

@palafo @Chanders Yeah, that's unfair. I think Brad Stone/Markoff/Carr doing good job at Bits pointing out hyperbole standard at these events.

Fair or not, every time a Times writer decides to say something like "cracked the code" or "changed the game," readers who are sensitive to such conflicts are going to get a bit uncomfortable. Surely it wouldn't hurt to throw in a forthright discussion of the issue, or at least a few disclaimers.

To be fair, Times writers weren't the only ones to wax eschatological about the event. The ever-saturnine Nick Carr saw the new tablet as the culmination of our transition to cloud computing:

The PC era ended this morning at ten o’clock Pacific time, when Steve Jobs mounted a San Francisco stage to unveil the iPad, Apple’s version of a tablet computer....The obsolescence of the PC has spurred demand for a new kind of device - portable, flexible, always connected - that takes computing into the cloud era. Suddenly, in other words, the tablet is a solution to a problem everyone has..... Today, Jobs’s ambitions are grander than ever. His overriding goal is to establish his company as the major conduit, and toll collector, between the media cloud and the networked computer. Jobs doesn’t just want to produce glamorous gizmos. He wants to be the impresario of all media.

The notion that the tablet might serve as the media biz's savior took hits from all directions once the iPad's outline began filling in:

@yelvington The iPad will render your news site just fine ... and ignore all the Flash rich media ads. Not the savior of journalism, folks.

"Steve Jobs can't save us," Michael Wolff wrote. Bill Mitchell at Poynter noted approvingly that Apple's pitch for the pad promised "that familiar old experience of curling up with my favorite paper/book/magazine -- with some cool functionality thrown in, too."

At GigaOm, Mathew Ingram weighed all the pluses and minuses and came up with the inevitable, but persuasive, no-silver-bullet argument:

Newspapers and magazines still have to figure out what they have that is unique, different and special in a way that makes people want to pay for it. That was the problem before the iPad came along, and it continues to be the central problem facing content creators of all kinds, not just newspapers and magazines.

On the threshold of... something, here is a roundup of the cream of the final 24 hours of Apple rumor and speculation:

In Slate, William Saletan makes the case (previously articulated by Jeff Sonderman) that the week's tech news may be more significant than tonight's State of the Union.

On the other hand, Anil Dash called for some civic perspective:

Right now there are a lot of hopeful, and possibly deluded, people in the old-line media businesses who hope that an Apple tablet will prop up their failing magazine, newspaper or television businesses. Those of us who are digitally savvy are probably having a chuckle at their expense, snickering at their wishful thinking. But Apple will invest a lot more in saving any given book publisher than they ever will in saving civic society, in protecting individuals' rights, or in engaging in diplomacy to neutralize the threat of violent extremists.

Derek Powazek hoped Apple would offer a new path for independent publishers to support their work.

Dave Winer thinks Apple's head is -- or should be -- in the cloud.

Late last night Jason Calacanis tweeted he'd had a tablet under NDA for the last 10 days and released a string of detailed posts.

@jason Yes, it's true... I've been beta testing the Apple tablet for the past two weeks and it's amazing.

@jason Note to press: No, not going to break my NDA w/ Apple/steve so u can get jump on announcement. It is the most *amazing* device ever.

@jason The best part ofthe apple tablet as beta user has been the built in HDTV tuner and pvr, and the chess game.

@jason Also, the apple tablet is really amazing for newspapers. Video conferencing is super stable, but nothing new.

@jason The price will be 599, 699 and 799 depending on size and memory in apple tablet. Also, wireless keyboard + monitor connection for tv

Robert Scoble initially thought Calacanis must have been pulling our legs. Cody Brown resented the spoilers and also saw a put-on:

@CodyBrown Ack, spoiler dump from @jason. Crazy Uncle opening your presents on x-mas eve, killing Santa/Steve 140 characters at a time.

@CodyBrown I am actually going to call BS on @Jason's late night drive. OLED has been debunked, solar panel sounds bat shit, NDA would have his Balls.

It was either one of the greatest hoaxes or one of the most brazen acts of embargo-ignoring in tech-news history. We'll know shortly. Any bets on whether Calacanis will be in on the next Apple unveiling? [UPDATE: Hoax it was -- nearly all of Calacanis's info was wrong.]

In another post, meanwhile, Brown warned that shovelware-style repackaging of old news products was unlikely to rescue media companies:

What the NYT mistakenly assumes is that browsing content is one of the things people most want to do on the new device. Just as iPhone apps, not reading or watching content on the iPhone, is what made it exciting, the same will apply here. It’s much more likely that what will capture the imagination of tablet user are applications that are uniquely suited for the medium. It’s possible for the NYT to create an application that will do this, but it’s not one that they are going to have by copying and pasting the articles from their print edition into a template. My hope is that that’s not what they are launching tomorrow but their article hints that it will probably be the case.

I, for one, welcome our new tablet overlord!

The week's two big journosphere stories -- the New York Times pay plan and the Apple tablet -- collided last night with the posting of Brad Stone and Stephanie Clifford's Times piece, "With Apple Tablet, Print Media Hope for a Payday." Apple's forthcoming device might, they wrote, give "the media industry a kind of time machine -- a chance to undo mistakes of the past":

By marrying its famously slick software and slender designs with the iTunes payment system, Apple could help create a way for media companies to alter the economics and consumer attitudes of the digital era. This opportunity, however, comes with a sizable catch: Steven P. Jobs...With the new tablet, media companies could be submitting themselves to similar pricing restrictions [to those music companies hate] and sacrificing their direct relationship with customers to Apple.

Tweets were widely skeptical:

@chanders That NYT Apple Tablet Link floating around Twitter tonight appears to have been written by an Apple PR exec. http://nyti.ms/6kawvQ. Yawn.

@patrickruffini Why is all the coverage of the Apple Tablet about providing new contexts for old media? Disconcerting.

@poniewozik I hope the iTablet will be cool and save my job too, but WAY too much wishful thinking in the media coverage. Aren't we the skeptics?

@gaberivera NYT has learned that NYT is developing an Apple tablet version of NYT, but NYT won't tell the NYT under what terms: http://bit.ly/7dNV5d

@aschweig really glad apple has saved the newspaper industry with a device that doesn't even exist yet, guess we don't have to worry about it anymore

@codybrown "a 10-inch *color* display allows newspapers to deliver with an eye to the design that had grabbed readers in print" yes! Finally. Color!

@greglinch The Applet Tablet will not only replace paper products like newspapers & mags, but also paper planes and mache #appletabletrumorijuststarted

@seanblanda @greglinch I heard it will be able to do xrays #appletabletrumorijuststarted

Rex Hammock posted that "Steve Jobs is not the savior of the free press and old media. Get over it."

But Jeff Sonderman argued, only partly tongue-in-cheek, that Jobs' tablet show was a bigger event than Wednesday's other newsquake -- President Obama's State of the Union address.

And at the Guardian, Charles Arthur built a little wisdom-of-the-crowd survey to guess the final specs of Apple's device.

The reluctant pundit

Aphoristic insight from a Jay Rosen Q&A:

@jayrosen_nyu Q4 #journchat One reason I am not a pundit is that when it's difficult to form an opinion I vocalize the difficulty rather than my opinion.

@jayrosen_nyu Q6 #journchat Advice I give journalists and J-students: The best reason to blog is that it teaches you the Web http://bit.ly/7AuXV7 2/4

@jayrosen_nyu Q6 #journchat Advice I give journalists and J-students: You have no choice but to grapple with the entire puzzle: tech, biz, users, news 3/4

@jayrosen_nyu Q6 #journchat Advice to journalists and J-students: The age of mass media was just that: an age. Can't last forever http://bit.ly/83IXtL 4/4

@jayrosen_nyu Q8 Pro journalism used to be about getting the separations right. Now it's about getting the connections right #journchat

Laugh of the day: SimPaywall

Paywall, the game!: Jonathan Stray at Nieman Lab put together a Flash-game simulation of paywall economics.

Long read of the day: Rusbridger's optimism

In "Does journalism exist?", Alan Rusbridger's Hugh Cudlipp lecture, the Guardian editor makes the case against paywalls and for the open Web:

Journalists have never before been able to tell stories so effectively, bouncing off each other, linking to each other (as the most generous and open-minded do), linking out, citing sources, allowing response – harnessing the best qualities of text, print, data, sound and visual media. If ever there was a route to building audience, trust and relevance, it is by embracing all the capabilities of this new world, not walling yourself away from them.

Idea of the day: Digg for Obama

@fmanjoo The White House (or someone) should launch a site where you can vote up stories for Obama to read. The 5 Pieces O should Read This Week.