Happiness comes from our relationships, our health, our work, our marriages, and our self-concept. Technology is necessary for none of these for children.
With, that is, the possible exception of self-concept. "I know how computers work and how to use them" is a positive self-concept. Author is knocking the ball out of the park here.
I didn't argue that an iPad will make you happy. Rather that it would make a very young child more engaged, more "delighted" and thus, a bit happier, than would a command line interface. As I said elsewhere, it seems even more preferable for kids that young to mostly skip all of the above.
The article (and the rest of the author's writings on the topic) contains a lot of evidence that his children are delighted with what they're doing. They're happily choosing to spend hours of time tinkering with this stuff, both with dad and on their own.
And it's not surprising at all. You're not thinking like a small child. Children focus intently on things that would bore adults to tears all the time. They have so little context that almost anything can be deeply interesting to them.
Now that I have a one-year-old, we spent a lot of time admiring the workings of garbage trucks, examining grass, etc. I can easily see his curiosity evolving over the next couple years to the point where he could amuse himself for hours with a command line and a speech synthesizer.
And he likes the iPad too. This isn't an either-or proposition.
I disagree. A blank command line is freedom. It's an invitation to do whatever you like. To discover. To try. To fail. To explore.
If you have 5 (or 50) icons to choose from, where's the blank slate? Where's the great outdoors? Where's the "I built it myself!"?
The boys love to eat the food from our garden that they helped plant and nurture a lot more than food from a store.
If they have ownership and freedom to explore, engagement is natural.
If you don't start with the preconceived notion that the command line is too hard or not engaging enough for children, maybe you will find that it isn't.
I love the CLI and spend much more time in it than in every other UI, but I was a Windows user for years, where I barely used it, and I still felt all of that.
My blank slate was an empty text file in Notepad and a browser (this was on a public computer, I couldn't install stuff).
