It turns on and turns off when I want it too.
My lovely wife bought me an iPad for Christmas. Now I have a whole new level of distain for the PC. Don’t get me wrong, I have always had a computer of one kind or another and most were PCs, we got along just fine. They work well as long as you take care not to have too high of expectations and learn to deal with their self destructive nature. The one issue that irks me to no end is how they turn on and off.
Back in 1986 my first real computer was a Commodore 64. The 64 stood for the amount of memory in Kilo bytes. Yes, Kilo. These days the only time people hear the phrase Kilo is in reference to police drug raids. The programmers of the 64 managed to create a graphical operating system with a mouse and a word processing program that incorporated most of the features of MS Word including fonts, spell check and full color printing into a program that would fit into 64k of RAM.
The Commodore 64 startup process when something like this: Turn the computer on, turn on the monitor (Cheap TV) insert the GEOS disk into the floppy drive (177kb), type Load A, wait a minute for the program to load, then type in Run Geos. It took about two minutes.
To turn off the Commodore 64 you simply saved whatever you’re working on and hit the power switch.
A normal PC startup process goes something like this: Turn on the computer, wait for windows to load, sign in to unlock the computer, wait for the system to check on what ever it checks on, click off a few dialog boxes that remind you to do something like update virus protections, then you can use it.
To turn off a normal PC you have to ask it to shut down. Please turn off. In a number of cases it tells you something or another can’t shut down right now unless you tell it to do so manually. Once that is done in a few minutes it finally shuts off. Every time my pc does this I feel a sense of relief when it finally shuts down. It’s like a car that diesels when you turn off the key, it rumbles and chokes a few seconds before it finally dies. I also have no idea what the hell it does when it shuts down and why it doesn’t do whatever it is earlier.
To start the iPad you hit the on/off button or the home button. All it asks for you to do is swipe your finger over the screen to unlock it. Total time until startup and usability: about one and a half seconds.
To turn off the iPad you press the on/off button. Total time to shut down: around one half a second.
I didn’t really understand how important this whole on/off process was until I got my iPad. I can either leave my laptop on all day, or I can push one button on my iPad and viola everything is there.
Sure the iPad has limitations, but so far it does what I want it to do. And almost as importantly it turns on and off when I tell it to.
-pF
Prairie Flounder 
If there’s one feature I miss from my old Kaypro it was that big red toggle of a power switch. It made such a satisfying “clunk” sound when I’d ragequit out of some 1980’s video game or other. The system would shut down immediately. Audibly. It was glorious.
As for startup times and such, you’re mostly looking at the benefit of a solid state drive and an operating system that is built to assume its presence. The quick turn-around time from “brick on your table” to “functional iProduct” is certainly a big selling point. Eventually I may even pick one up.
My friend has a big honking Mac that he is thoroughly enjoying after using PCs forever.
Another guy I know has an iPhone … and he’s just really annoying.
I’m of a mixed mind at this point: the iPad seems to be smaller than “big honking” and bigger than the iPhone: it sounds pretty cool though.
note: do the French say “viola” or “voila”? … I’m never sure because I’m not listening to them usually. hee hee!
I’ve heard the same praise from others about the iPad’s quick startup. One of these days we’ll have one of these at our house.