I really don't understand the wave of alarmist posts on the 'end of a tinkering era'. Today, we have more communities and devices for tinkering than we've ever had. Magazines like Make, sites like Hack-a-day, platforms like Arduino, and <i>countless</i> open source projects that are simply there to be messed with, and one device that comes out with a (probably) justified need to be locked down, and everyone raises panic? If I ever have the desire to mess with anything technological today, I can literally get my hands on anything, from affordable FPGA boards with great I/O, to open mobile devices, to even RF hacking! (GNU Radio's great.)<p>The iPad will <i>never</i> harm anyone's ability to tinker with technology that want to. There will <i>always</i> be platforms that are open by design and <i>always</i> be platforms that have been rooted/hacked/jailbroken/etc. Being a geek/hacker today is far more socially acceptable and wide-spread than it was in the 80s. I'd even argue that it is doing much more to advance the technology than a completely open device like OpenMoko. Completely open devices are rarely better designed than their commercial counterparts. They don't inspire complete neophytes ("I have to do <i>what</i> just to get a decent resolution?"), they don't push boundaries -- they only appeal to people who are already waist-deep in tinkering.<p>Frankly, if anything, all of this comes off as elitist. God forbid people get their hands on technology that doesn't have a steep learning curve or require you to write BASIC to be useful. Well-designed products that have a lot of concentrated money (and more importantly, talent) inspire people much more so than completely open systems. I think of them as (and please pardon the extremely hyperbolic analogy) well-polished, completed works of art. They won't teach you how to paint or let you alter them, but they'll show you what's possible with the canvas and advance the art.<p>I'm actually now thinking back to a discussion with a friend of mine, who's a collector of 60's-era oscilloscopes. He was raving about them as being the pinnacle of electronics engineering. Not only were these scopes beautifully designed, but their manuals detailed <i>everything</i> about them, how they worked, what tricks they used to function, what micro-components they used. Their documentation authors really <i>wanted</i> you to understand exactly what made it function. Maybe that's the ideal, but I still believe that beautifully-designed products, even closed, further the state of hacking far far more than completely open platforms. If you don't believe in it, don't buy it.<p>If you believe they're a step in the wrong direction for open platforms, make another blog post tomorrow when you have <i>less</i> open platforms, <i>less</i> hobbyist projects, <i>less</i> educational materials, and <i>less</i> hobbyist communities than yesterday.