Quote:
Originally Posted by DMB
Does this mean that if, say, I wanted to install MS Office on my hypothetical iPad, I would have to buy it from the Apple store?
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Correct.
Except there is no MS Office or Open Office or equivalent.
There are light duty document viewer/editor apps and Apple sells their equivalent to MS Works as unbundled apps.
iPad is not a Macintosh tablet and should not be cross-shopped or compared to laptops or Windows TabletPCs. iPad is, rather, a derivative of iPod touch and iPhone and is based on smartphone technology (ARM CPUs, Flash storage, etc) instead of x86 desktop-derived tech. You *can* use them to carry out some light productivity work (just as people used to do on PalmPilots and PocketPCs) but that is not what they are designed to do; iPads are *not* full-function computers and cannot be turned into computers. (I've seen it tried, though.)
What iPads are primarily designed for is (paid) content consumption, gaming, and non-Flash web surfing.
(Flash-based web sites are designed for desktop PC browsers and eat up too many resources to provide a smooth and responsive experienced on ARM-based hardware so rather than try, Apple just told website developers to stop using Flash and use HTML5. This has not yet happened.)