Yeah, of course I am going to want an iPad. It is shiny. It is new. It is cool. Does it REALLY do much more than an iPhone, or be enough of a laptop replacement to use instead of one of those? Dunno. It will be good to start hearing reports from folks once they actually have these in their hands in a couple of months. Does that middle ground actually add value? Are there a lot of situations where the iPhone isn’t enough, but you really don’t need an actual MacBook or whatnot? I suspect the answer is yes, and that for a lot of use cases, this will fit nicely in that space.

Like the iPhone, I may end up being waiting for the next generation rather than going for the first one, but this does look pretty darn nice. Brandy is pretty underwhelmed, on the “it is just a big iPhone” side of the fence. I see a lot of potential though for this though. It may not live up to all of that potential on day one, but I can definitely see a case for a device like this doing 95% (or more) of what a really large group of users need a computer for.

Dunno though, I am 100% still in the Jobs Reality Distortion Field. And I know that often wears off. I will most certainly be looking for what the reviews start looking like once real people have these in the wild and once they have been using it for a few weeks. And maybe after I’ve been able to actually play with one in an Apple Store.

But, first impressions… this looks like a really nice device, and geek lust is in play.

Oh, but this is also a green light moment for me. We delayed my regularly scheduled computer replacement from 2009 to 2010 due to the whole having a baby instead thing. As of a couple weeks ago I could have gone ahead and ordered a replacement, but I held off. Nobody expected anything today that would affect Apple’s desktop line, but I know how mad I would have been if I’d ordered something and then a week later Apple released a new version… so I waited. It was just a couple of weeks. But with this major event done, it is clear that nothing was announced that would fundamentally change my calculus for what I need to buy to replace my old computer. The iPad would not be a desktop replacement for me. I have access to a work laptop, so a personal laptop would not gain me much, and I am not feeling the Mac Pro vibe, so it will be an iMac for me. And the MacRumors Buyer’s Guide has iMacs at mid-cycle. (It has been 99 days since the last iMac update, and they have averaged about 221 days between updates.)

If I hadn’t already put off the computer replacement I’d love to wait for the NEXT update anyway, which will probably be in another three or four months, but using my old iMac is now painful and frustrating… I am constantly fighting it and swearing as it can’t keep up with what I want it to do… so there will probably be an order for a nice shiny top of the line iMac happening in my very near future… like later today near future most likely.

In the meantime though, I’ve got to go crush through some stuff I have to have done for work by tomorrow, and some more stuff that I need to have done for Friday… this morning I had to watch the baby while Brandy had a fun root canal anyway. Now that is over, and so is the Apple event, and snacks at a coffee shop served as lunch… so time to get to work.