"The relatives in question DON'T WANT to be taught the complexities of a modern PC, they want to browse the web and do a little email. The iPad is perfect for that."

Until it all goes awry and then you get "Please, come here imediately and fix this crap!". And it will go wrong, even on an iSlab. And it doesn't have to be a HW error, it could be a wrong adress, script, pop-up or alike.

And then you will HAVE to explain why it happened, and how to avoid it, so you better educate people anyways.

What, you don't have a mother? Figures...

And another thing about "clean things you can use with no geeks around". How do you think your mother will use the iSlab? Like you with washed hands, sitting nicely in an armchair, holding it the right way, and patiently swiping through the interface? YEAH RIGHT XD

She will do it in the kitchen while cooking, or doing something else, putting it on the edge of the table so it will fall a few times, get dirty with vinegar and some sauce, breadcrums, dirt for her flowers etc.

And then it will fail in the exact same sense that you bought it in the first place, simplicity. Because you can't carry standard equipment (PC) around the house, and netbooks/laptops look like serious equipment that you cherrish and look after.

in producing posts that contain even worse analysis than Lawrence's, and have nothing whatsoever to do with either his or my points.

Publishers in general can make money from one of two directions: charging the reader or advertising. Charge the reader too much and they won't buy. Use too much advertising and they won't buy either. Magazine and newspaper publishers mix the two and have to be careful with both.

Freetards like yourself fail to realise that you ALWAYS pay to see commercial content, either in the form of bandwidth, screen space and time to show the adverts, or in cash to remove adverts. Wired are betting that they can charge you AND collect advertising money just like a regular printed magazine, and providing they produce a sufficiently compelling product they may be able to get away with it. They're trying an experiment to see if it works. Its that hard to understand?

As for teaching mother's/elderly relatives etc to use computers, there's a saying that you may not have heard of: Never try to teach a pig to sing, it only wastes your time and it annoys the pig. The relatives in question DON'T WANT to be taught the complexities of a modern PC, they want to browse the web and do a little email. The iPad is perfect for that.

If we all continue to think "my mother cant use a computer because its complicated" are doing a disservice to your mother. Why would you not want to educate your mother on computers?
Why is it beneficial to her to be computer illiterate? What if school went on that aproach? if they started to reform on the oreilly factor of the stupid kids are stupid so just dont educate them, then it creates a perfect ignorance for people to continue to fear technology. Apple products dont make you computer literate or make things easier to use, they just make you dumber. I am also mechanic and it doesn't make any sense to me that a person who relies on a car cant change a tire, check the fluids, or even know where that a car has a jack in the trunk. See there's another opportunity for apple, cars. Dont fix the flat tire (apples battery technique) just buy a new car, you know lets glue to tires to the rims, better yet weld the damn rim to the drive shafts. HECK LETS GO ALL OUT AND WELD THE HOOD SO PEOPLE WONT HAVE TO CHECK FLUIDS.

This is just reaffirming what has already been said over and over again.
The ipad is just another version of cdrom multimedia. The one that was supposed to save the print media, now its a mobile version of this.
Why the heck would people want to spend 500 megabytes of a magazine that has maybe 30 percent of that bulk in ads?
Now that the digital issue doesnt need to be printed, they can surely leave out the ads right?
That model is already working in several sites, you pay money or bandwidth from ads.
I cant say much more about this stupid model because its just so stupid and its already been put so well by this guy
"So what does Marvel(ipad app) do to "enhance" its comics? They take away the right to give, sell or loan your comics. What an improvement. Way to take the joyous, marvellous sharing and bonding experience of comic reading and turn it into a passive, lonely undertaking that isolates, rather than unites. Nice one, Misney."
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/02/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either.html
and the original one that started it all
http://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2010/04/01/cd-roms-and-ipads/

Whether or not you think that Wired is worth the price they are asking (and it's the publishers of Wired that sets the price, not Apple) the remainder of the article is based on faulty reasoning.

In modern terms a 500MB download is't large. It's about the size of ONE TV episode in SD resolution. An iTunes download of a TV episode in HD (which also includes an SD version) will use about 1700MB. Any halfway decent broadband service in the UK these days is marked as "Unlimited*" where the * means some kind of fair usage policy, but 500MB is a drop in the bucket.

Just like TV episodes you don't keep every single book or magazine that you've ever downloaded on your portable player. You keep ones that you haven't read/watched and some of your favourites. Even the base 16GB model has enough space for 32 magazines/TV episodes. That's a LOT of reading/watching material. You could easily spend a fortnight's holiday away from the internet and not exhaust what you have on the SSD.

Apple have nothing against Adobe software being used to create CONTENT (now that DreamWeaver supports HTML5 they've even less objection), they just don't want them creating applications. Some of the reasoning behind that is commercial, some is technical. Holding up a 500MB magazine as a demonstration of Adobe's development prowess doesn't help further your cause.

Whatever you think, Amazon with their Kindle system have already proved that there's a market for automatically downloaded, paid for, electronic editions of magazines and journals. Accept that not all people insist on getting all their content for free. If publishers can convince people that there's value in paying for their products then more power to them. If they can't then they'll find another model or go out of business.

There is a diminishing number of people that want electronic magazines - trendy old people think it might be a good idea to take their traditional print mags and digitize them. The younger generation don't want to be walled in and have a whole bunch of material filtered through a single creator - they use Twitter, Digg, Reddit etc to find single articles they are interested in - you know... the Web.

In the sentence "The so called exclusive content is merely a thinly veiled attempt to justify gauging on those poor souls who are about to shell out hundreds of Pounds for an Iphone without a phone" should "gauging" be "gouging"? Or is this an Anglicism unknown to American linguistics or lexicographers?