It is also dead quiet—no fan, no humming, nada. This is the future of computing. Daring Fireball.

I don’t doubt it. Did I mention? I bought an iPad? Did you imagine I would not?

Like so much of the future, the iPad tiptoes in on little cats’ feet. I wasn’t knocked out by Steve’s unveiling, I don’t think anyone was. Nothing like the time the big screen zeroed in on his right front pocket and he withdrew, not from the pocket of his jeans, but from the watch pocket, that itty-bitty Shuffle. Now that was a wow moment.

Nor will the iPad make a wow moment in your life. But I’ll tell you how it’s going in my life. Slowly, steadily creating its own work flow—and play flow.

The iPad itself eerily disappears. It’s just you and that knock-out screen, you and the app, you and your work. Or in my case—I will never play Uno on the iPhone again. In fact, ancient as I am, I can’t think why peer at that tiny screen and tinier keyboard, when the iPad is quietly, gloriously visible. Okay, I am a Visual person. Most writers are. This is why I have been unable to think, for many years, how people stand the damn ugliness of a Windows window. Can’t they see? Well, obviously not to the point they are bothered, but oh my, you want to look at something beautiful every day, you must be a fan-boi. An elitist. Drunk on the kool-aid. Something derogatory that makes—or tries to make—something ugly out of a love for beauty. Probably the same guys who would die for a car with beautiful lines.

The whole argument, the whole flap, online and off, is totally worth avoiding. It means nothing. Except for the fact that print media and, even worse, the internet has soooo much space to fill. Yeah, the internet by orders of magnitude worse. Where opinions have become trivial and few people, precious few columns, blogs, publications are worth reading.

Reading in, you know, the old-fashioned way, where good writing lights up the brain. Pow, pow, the little explosions go off, the happy dance of the synapse, when the mind is fed good food and the brain experiences delight.

Oh, call me an irrelevant novelist, full of dreams. Go ahead, call me. In the silence of the iPad cometh … a very pleasant, unobtrusive way of reading the web, reading books, watching movies* and doing your own work that will in a few short years make the clatter of this MacBook Pro keypad as I type anachronistic. No fucking wonder this project has been Steve Jobs‘ personal baby, and by all that is holy, OMG he got it right.