A quick addendum to my last post: TechCrunch wins the snap poll for looniest week-after reporting on the iPad rollout, with this story about a rumor that Apple has a super-secret second and ohmygod, like, totally different kind of iPad in the works. It’s silly on its face, lunatic if you buy into the notion peddled by Moren, Spiers & Frank, and it doesn’t credibly suggest anything other than this: After months of huffing at the paper bag that holds Apple rumors it’s awfully hard to quit cold turkey.

It begins.

One of the fun things about a big tech rollout is watching the smart-money boys start to coalesce around What It All Means. Three sharp guys — Dan Moren, Fraser Spiers and Steven Frank — have posted think pieces on the iPad in the last few days, and they share some provocative common elements. To boil it down: The iPhone was Apple’s stalking horse for a contemplated move in the direction of a closed, simplified computing system that trades file-system access for simplicity and directness of interaction; the iPad is the company’s big bet that computing will move increasingly in that direction; the backlash against it mostly comes from geekboys, who have become the tinkerer shamans of a world in which computers have to be fiddled with before they really do what you want.

Are they right? Who knows? Most of the coverage pro and con so far has come from people who haven’t yet had the opportunity to get hands on with the thing, so there’s been little independent way to assess Apple chair Steve Jobs’ rhapsodic claims that the iPad brings a radical new tactility and intimacy to the computing experience. (And it ain’t for nothing that Jobs is the originating practitioner of the Reality Distortion Field.) But Moren, Spiers and Frank are thoughtful guys who write well about technology and its place in our lives. What they have to say is always food for thought.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

eBookNewser has a fascinating little video interview between Apple chair Steve Jobs and Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal/AllThingsD. It provides a great illustration into why Jobs is effective as a conceiver of computing devices, and the ways in which tech writers sometimes get netted in arcana. Look for the exchange starting at around 2:30, in which the two spar over the issue of battery life. Jobs estimates that the iPad will run for about 10 hours on a charge while being used as an ebook reader; Mossberg presses him on whether there’s a “battery cost” to the iPad’s backlit display, which is geekese for: Isn’t it better in theory to use the Kindle’s e-ink display technology, which draws far less power and allows the Kindle to hold a charge for a week or longer? Jobs’ answer is beautifully to the point: “You know, there isn’t,” he says, shrugging. “Because you just end up plugging it in. Or docking it or whatever you’re gonna do with it. It’s not a big deal. Ten hours is a long time. You’re not gonna read for ten hours.”

He’s right, of course. Who cares, under most circumstances, whether a reader holds its charge for 10 hours or a week? It has no functional importance. The thing runs down, you plug it in. It runs down again, you plug it in again, and repeat until the next gotta-have-it device comes down the pike. That ability — to see the device through the eyes of a user — is valuable for both executives and columnists. Mossberg’s one of the best columnists there is. But to the degree that he lost sight of how people use their computing devices everyday, he lost the round.

True/Slant contributor Sara Libby and — oh golly, a whole lot of other people have weighed in this morning on Chris Matthews’ bewildering quote from last night:

I forgot [Obama] was black tonight for an hour … I said, ‘Wait a minute. He’s an African American guy in front of a bunch of other white people. … It was so broad-ranging, so in tune with so many problems, of aspects, and aspects of American life that you don’t think in terms of the old tribalism, the old ethnicity. It was astounding in that regard.

Sara sees racism in Matthews’ remark. I don’t. Let me take an unpopular position here: Matthews is loony as they come and half the time I don’t understand what the hell he’s talking about. He gets caught up in these rhetorical tropes and God only knows where he’s going to come out. But that’s the thing– there’s a disconnect between his brain and his mouth in those moments. I saw the moment in question, and my impression was that he’d found the most garbled, inept and generally dumbass way to say that for an hour he’d forgotten to marvel at the fact that this was the first black president standing up there for his first State of the Union. I mean, let’s be honest: How many times in the last year have you seen Obama on TV and thought Holy cow — the black guy actually won! I know I have, a dozen times or more. I still do. It’s a marveling, pleasurable moment.

What I think Matthews was trying to say, in his typically overheated and jumbled way, was that Obama has settled into the job in a way that pushes the wonder of his historical accomplishment into the background. I think. This is a guy who brings the crazy on a daily basis — remember him saying that Obama “sends a thrill up my leg”? That was fun. But is he a bigot? I don’t believe so.

Historian Howard Zinn died today. One of the patron saints of the Left from the early 1960s on, Zinn led a remarkably rich and valuable life, and toward the end of it he managed to knock at least one reader out with his essential decency and optimism:

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.

If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

(The Optimism of Uncertainty: The Nation, 9/20/2004)