And Mark Pilgrim adds an essay defending the right to tinker.

Steven's essay nags at me, though. Those of us who started with an own-able machine and became programmers are married to that experience, but I don't think that's enough evidence to say kids who grow up without similarly own-able devices won't find their own way to loving the act of creating technology. Long before this became a debate, I wondered on behalf of my own kids whether modern machines were un-ownable simply because they were so complicated. All born tinkerers wonder how things work, but it's no longer so easy to find out how they work just by touching them.

To a certain extent, the Arduino is the Commodore 64 of the modern era, with the realization that the device you're programming doesn't have to be the same device you use to write the program. It's entirely plausible to program an Arduino or a Lego Mindstorms NXT brick from an iPad, and in fact that's an awesome idea and not at all disallowed by Apple's App Store policies. Seriously, LabView or the Arduino IDE running on the iPad. How awesome would that be.

One thing Steven doesn't address is the fact that iPad isn't just closed to a particular layer of usability abstraction, it's closed to the whims of a single company. If I have something I need to do that Apple doesn't like, I don't get to do it. This is different from not being able to run Emacs on my refrigerator. Apple banished a Commodore 64 emulator from the App Store—twice—because it exposed the Commodore 64 BASIC environment, the same environment that supposedly "made me" the high-paid all-powerful software engineer I am today.

Nobody has said the word "appliance" yet, and it seems worth connecting this new discussion with that old one. We "old world" folks have been talking about computers that can't do everything for a while, and even begging for one to give to our "new world" family members. I think the "old world" reaction to the iPad being closed is mostly just disappointment at a lost opportunity in functionality that can't be fixed in the same way as with a more open device (installing a third-party operating system). But we'll probably see a competitor take up the slack, assuming another company can get pretty close with the hardware.

One point of Mark's remains: If computing appliances replace the general purpose computer as the mainstream household device, fewer people will have access to own-able computers, and fewer people will be discovering technology through serendipity, as we did.

[Meta-note: I just noticed my blockquotes haven't been showing up as such in feed readers. That's now fixed.]