Two years ago I began slowly switching to Apple hardware, even though I am primarily a Windows / .NET developer and thus require both Windows and Visual Studio.  I'm using Macs because I think Apple makes great hardware.  I currently own a Mac Pro, a 17 inch MacBook Pro, and an iPhone 3G.

The 17 inch MacBook Pro was my latest addition.  Having a high-end desktop and a small smartphone, you'd think you might want something in between those two extremes.  And whadaya know, that's a niche the laptop fills.  I needed a fairly powerful laptop that I could use on the road for sales presentations, and with the MacBook Pro I can not only run Windows Server under a VM, but I can switch back to OS/X and use it for testing the client-side portion of my software on the Mac.  Bonus.

So the laptop is my missing link, if you will, between my desktop and my smartphone.  I like the evolution analogy.  Creationists like to argue that evolution can't be true because there are missing links between species, but I love the evolutionists' response to that argument: there will always be missing links, no matter how many new species we discover, because if there are two species A and C, and a missing link species B is later discovered, all that does is create two more missing links, one from A -> B, and another from B -> C.

Thinking along these lines, a laptop that fills in the gap between my desktop and smartphone doesn't solve my problem, it only doubles it.  Now I have to wonder what device should fill in the gap between my desktop and my laptop, and what device fills in the gap between my laptop and my smartphone.

This is the mindset that Steve Jobs put us in last week as he unveiled the iPad, Apple's long-awaited tablet computing device.  Do we need such a thing, and if so, why?

Given that I already own three Apple devices, one for each major computing category, I'm of course interested in the iPad.  At this point, I would be more prone to buy an iPad than I would a netbook.  But I'd also be just as likely to keep the three devices I've got rather than adding a fourth device.  For me, that is a key difference than it is for others that have ditched their desktops altogether.  For me, the iPad, would be a fourth device, not a third device as Steve Jobs argued last week.  I'll have more to say about the iPad in my next post.

This is the complete tree of computing technology as I see it.  You start with a Mac Pro and an iPhone.  To fill in the gap between the two, you get a 17 inch MacBook Pro.  To fill in the gap between the Mac Pro and the 17 inch MacBook Pro, you get a 27 inch iMac.  Now, you fill in the gap between the 27 inch iMac and the 17 inch MacBook Pro with a 21 inch iMac.  Next, you fill in the gap between the 17 inch MacBook Pro and the iPhone with an iPad.  We're not done yet.  The gap from the iPad to the iPhone is filled in with an iPod Touch (which has more memory than an iPhone).  Of course, you now have to fill the gap between the iPad and the 17 inch MacBook Pro with a 13 inch MacBook Pro.  Then, of course a 15 incher fills in the gap between the 17 and 13 inchers.  But now you still gotta fill in the gap between the 13 incher and the iPad, so you get yourself a MacBook Air.  And finally, you fill in the gap between the MacBook Air and the iPad with a Asus T91 tablet netbook.  Check back with me in a few months.  Oh crap, then I still need to get a Kindle to fill the the gap between the iPad and the iPod Touch.