My fear is that the further down the ‘appliance’ road we go, the more manufacturer and publisher lock-in we end up with and we could easily end up back at the stage we were at 30 years ago when any sofwtare manufacturer ended up writing multiple versions for multiple machines, not just multiple versions for multiple operating platforms.

The applications available for the iPad, for example, are many in number but many are fairly trivial. If the appliance machines run a standard browsers then all is not lost – we just run a domestic fileserver on which third party applications can be loaded, but we then still have the DRM issues.

Some interesting points about appliances, but as ever, don’t forget that the huge majority don’t want “a computer”, they want “the internet” or just “a facebook”… And sometimes appliances are just handy – I’m probably at the geekier end of the spectrum, but I’ve got the TV hooked up to a media centre using the PS3 via DLNA, rather than messing with a computer. And think about the number of devices these days that run embedded Linux and are a computer/appliance, but you just wouldn’t know…