I was checking out Daring Fireball yesterday and John Gruber shared some of his thoughts and opinions after having had a chance to play with and test Apple’s iPad.

His article has some very interesting points in it and is worth reading in it’s entirety. One thing he mentions that is worth bringing up here is comparing the iPad with an automatic transmission in a car. He points out that an automatic car still cycles through gears but this process is hidden from the driver. He equates how the iPhone and iPad OS is removing certain elements from the user, like file system and where you install applications, but that these things are still present underneath the surface.

It’s pretty interesting when you think about it, the iPhone/iPad OS is in that sense really creating something more simplistic and elegant. On these devices you don’t have to worry about where you will save a document or project, it’s saved automatically within the application. Looking at a normal computer and I have to say that this is going to make computing appeal to a lot of people that can’t stand computers. I can’t begin to think of how many times I’ve been asked by people to help them sort out their computer. Back in December I took a look at a friends MacBook, a recent Windows convert, and it was a mess. He hadn’t installed a lot of applications properly, so that when you launched them the disk images he originally downloaded would all start to mount. These type of errors and confusing can all abstracted away if the iPad/iPhone OS starts to be used by real day to day applications.