See: Paradox of Choice. Ignoring something is also a choice.

To actually make things simpler you've got to make it easier to choose. When you download a desktop app, you've got to trade off between, "is this app useful to me", and, "will this app break my computer". Since apps on the iPhone are sandboxed, and are garunteed to uninstall cleanly, you don't need to worry about the second question.

Also have a look at what Microsoft are doing with permissions in .Net, they are slowly making it easier for Windows applications to be sandboxed. In a secure Linux enviroment, it is standard practice to give different apps their own users, with tailored permissions, eg the www user.

People are already confused which Google technology to bank on for mobile: Android, or Chrome OS?

Android's open-ness has already been a thorn in its side. Right now we're seeing the splintering of the Android platform thanks to meddling by individual hardware manufacturers - consumers are getting wildly different user experiences, some worse than others, depending on who they buy an Android phone from. This is disastrous for a platform trying to gain mindshare.

As the author wrote it, he's also criticizing Windows, OSX, & anything that's not the iPad. See his finder example. Instead of focusing on people who want to run their own programs, he says they don't want to make easy OS'es. (it doesn't make sense to me either)

"""There's another reality distortion field at work, though, and everyone that makes a living from the tech industry is within its tractor-beam. That RDF tells us that computers are awesome, they work great and only those too stupid to live can't work them"""

Not everyone. It's more and more obvious to me that I only thrive in computing where I can control my environment. I do make a living from the tech industry, and I find myself in the same position as "normals" do when faced with "software for normals", and I hate it as much as "they" do.

Error messages are meaningless to "them" but meaningful to me. So called 'friendly' error messages are also meaningless to "them" and worse they are meaningless to me as well.

Hiding complexity isn't simplifying things. Arjan van de Ven said about the 5 second linux boot project "Don't settle for 'make boot faster'; it's the wrong question. [..] It's not about booting faster, it's about booting in 5 seconds". - http://lwn.net/Articles/299483/

Apple are saying "it's not about a nice GUI over the top of a complex system, it's about a simple system". They've thrown out everything they can get away with and then a bit more; which Linux distro's can't or wont do. Linux is 'simplified' by people who don't want or need it to be simple, Windows is 'simplified' by people hobbled by backwards compatibility, inertia and lack of focused obsessive direction.