03 Apr iStakes

April 3:  Is this the transient alcoholic flicker on a too sweet rum cake, or a nuclear flash that will mark April 3 as a milestone we’ll observe 20 and 40 years from now?

According to David Pogue and Leo LaPorte, techies are scornful and users are awestruck, in which case, the smart money will be on the users.

But there’s a big problem. To some, Jobs and Apple are a modern version of Bauhaus: elegant utilitarian design with fascist undertones. Apple’s singular control over what media its machines can play, and what machines can play its media, represents a giant backward leap for computing, insist John Battelle and many others.

Google, of course, is going the other way, putting its apps in the cloud, and inviting everyone else to put theirs in the cloud too.

For Canadians, this resembles nothing so much as the time, a decade and a half ago, when Kenneth Thompson bet on content, and Conrad Black bet on dead trees. Only one of them is in prison.

The developers praise their own work in a slightly saccharine video here; the editors of WIRED show how it will work as a  pretty cool magazine here. Unvarnished video ad here.