&#62; All she knows is, "Wouldn't it be cool if my iPad had ... ?" or "Wow, I wish I could ... " And the tool she has not only gives her no ability to explore those possibilities, it looks like it's designed to actively impede her from exploring them.<p>While I understand this argument has no right or wrong answers, I can't say I agree to the above statement. Just by the virtue of having a well-designed piece of hardware in her hand, she can start asking these questions. If it was an open platform, it would most likely have been of lower quality, not as ground-breaking, and she wouldn't have had it in her hands in the first place (I'd love to be wrong here, but I'm afraid I can't find the evidence to prove myself wrong). The fact that it has "apps", written by real people can actually guide her to search online what it takes to create these apps, from which she can then find out about open platforms, programming languages, (even FPGAs!) and development in general.<p>I understand that talking about our curious, hypothetical protagonist we can prove anything we agree with, but without an extremely approachable, polished device it would simply not appeal to as many people. Most of these people will just be users, but some will be curious, and those are the ones we're talking about. Since hobbyist platforms are ubiquitous, you don't need to create yet another hackable platform, you need to get them interested.<p>I'm purposefully holding back anything specific to the iPad. Nor I, nor the majority of HN readers have even held the device, but knowing Apple, I think it can vastly increase the ubiquity of general purpose computing even more, and make good UI and design be expected. And that's a win for everyone.