We’ve been doing app development at work for iPad, so I was really excited yesterday to check it out on launch day. But the most interesting thing happened when I brought the iPad home. My two oldest kids, 12 and 5 years old, gravitated to it like moths to a flame. The “wow, this is cool” fascination that lit up their eyes really stuck with me.

On one hand, both have access to a home computer, a laptop, and an iPod Touch, so it’s not that they haven’t experienced a touch interface or lots of apps before. But the special sauce here was simply (and most powerfully) the form factor – small enough to be easily portable and large enough to do the things they care about – games, youtube, surfing, and messaging. Suddenly computing was available in every room and on every surface (couch, bed, floor, desk) of our house.

I watched my two little prognosticators of the future and realized that, in their minds, our home computer was now officially obsolete.