My friend Mike sent me a link to this, which is just hysterical: a parody piece of columnist Walt Mossberg interviewing Steve Jobs about the iPad. Includes NSFW language.

[youtube width=”480″ height=”355″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr4pPAn-m5g[/youtube]

I have not been a true Mac fanboy for many years, despite my having worked with and on their products since 1988. My philosophy goes something like this: if you are new to computing, if you are afraid of viruses and spyware and what to do about them, if you are not a rabid gamer and/or do not play all your games on a console, you’d do well to get a Mac. The more or less seamless user experience and piss-elegant hardware design is a winning combination. Alternatively, anyone who has a more-than-basic knowledge of the workings of computers and operating systems, who knows how to bring up the Task Manager and Google any processes that look fishy, who wants to play the widest possible range of computer games, and/or would rather shell out half the clams for a top-of-the-line workstation, is probably better off with a PC. There it is, in a nutshell. Somewhere in between these polar extremes lies the realm of Linux, CP/M, the BeOS and the venerable propeller-heads who cook their own operating systems.

All that having been said, the iPad looks to me like the most ridiculous waste of time, money and R&D Apple has undertaken since—geez, the eMate? Actually, I take that back: for its time, the eMate was far more revolutionary than the iPad, which at its heart is just a crippled iPhone with a thyroid condition. It’s a proprietary e-book reader with a double-amputee Web browser tacked onto it. For 500 bucks.

I’ll admit, I like the idea of Apple getting into the electronic book market. Any competition in this arena is going to be good for the consumer. And maybe Apple will do a better job of representing the interests of both authors/publishers and the public than has often been the case with other companies. Probably not, but just the fact that there’s another hat in the ring can’t hurt. And there’s that aforementioned elegance of piss they’re known for; in terms of human engineering, the iPad comes pretty close to the state of the art in this sort of e-reader, with color, WiFi and Internet capability. It just needs to either get a lot cheaper or a lot more capable before I’d do anything but laugh at the prospect of plonking down 500 bucks for this thing. This coming from the guy who spent 450 dollars on a GPS-enabled Windows Mobile PDA about a year before the GPS-enabled WM smartphones came into their own. Let’s just say I’ve learned my lesson….hopefully.

So someone give me a nudge when the iPad comes down to $299, and I’ll take another look.