Mac OS X Lion is a couple weeks old, and although I’m still a tad skeptical about the blending of the iPad and Mac operating systems, I’m trying my best to embrace the changes and new features.

But there’s one change that seems obvious to me, and I’m confused as to why Apple declined to make the switch in Lion.

I’m talking about the desktop.

Since the birth of modern operating systems, the desktop has served as the place for users to dump all the crap they need (and some they don’t). When you look at most people’s desktops, they’re cluttered with all sorts of icons for shortcuts, documents and poorly named folders.

The small screens of iPhones and iPads don’t have room for that kind of clutter, so Apple smartly left the desktop out of its iOS operating system and replaced it with a grid of app icons that serves as a program launcher.

That same idea made it into OS X Lion in the form of Launchpad – a very simple dock tool that takes over your entire desktop and displays the icons of your apps in an iPad-like grid.

Combine that with Apple’s big push for full-screen apps in Lion, and the desktop just seems unnecessary.

If I was the OS X team, I would have made the Launchpad grid the default function of the desktop and routed all file and folder management through the Finder.

The magic of the iPhone and iPad is their simplicity, and part of that is the ability to rearrange the homescreen and keep your device organized with so little effort. No matter how hard you try, it’s impossible to make an iPhone screen look cluttered.

So why not bring the same level of simplicity to the Mac? Kill the idea of traditional icons on the desktop and make it the home of your wallpaper and nothing more. The current approach to the desktop is just an invitation for disorganization and confusion – two things that will lead users to detest their Mac instead of adoring it.

In the Internet age, you shouldn’t have to sift through content to find something you actually want to read. This is one of the many reasons newspapers and magazines have become archaic in recent decades (I know Easter was yesterday, but don’t expect a resurrection for print media). New web-based services appear every day with innovative ways of customizing the news experience and helping people find stories that interest them.

The latest to join the movement is an iPad app called News.me. It links up with your Twitter account, pulls out the articles that people in your timeline are sharing, and then displays them in a readable format.

The only downside is that News.me will cost you 99¢ a week or $34.99 for a yearly subscription. While it’s great that the money will be distributed to publishers based on which articles you read, the app does not provide enough features to warrant a recurring fee.

News.me only supports Twitter integration – which means no Facebook and no RSS, so you’ll miss out on any stories that don’t appear in your timeline. And that brings up the central issue with News.me: it wants you to pay to read stuff that you could see for free just by using a regular Twitter app.

This is the way News.me comes off: “Do you have a Twitter account but lack the motivation to check it on a regular basis? Are you too lazy to actually click on Twitter links to read full articles? Then pay us to do it for you!”

The idea of organizing Twitter links in a pretty format is a valid idea, but there are already apps like Flipboard that do it better, support other types of accounts and cost nothing. Flipboard’s popularity makes it clear that people have a desire for personalized news, but there’s no proof yet that they are willing to pay for it.

This theory has been brewing in my head for a while and I think it’s the right time to unleash it.

When Apple first said that Mac OS X Lion would include some iOS-like features, it put me into a rage. I felt like the move was a conscious effort by Apple to dumb-down the Mac in order to take advantage of the popularity of the iPad and iPhone. I loved iOS on phones, I disliked it on tablets, and I knew I would hate it passionately on desktops and laptops.

I’ve calmed a bit since then – mostly because I can see Apple’s strategy and it’s hard to argue with its logic. iOS products are simple to use. Therefore more people (especially the computer illiterate) have the ability to use them. And therefore more people will buy them and make Apple money.

Facebook appears to be employing the same strategy for its application platform, but I’m not sure it will experience a similar level of success. Let’s use GameStop as an example. The video game giant launched a Facebook-based store last week that lets people browse, search and buy without ever leaving the Facebook website. Transactions are made using the Facebook credit system, which must be linked to a credit card or Paypal account.

GameStop is mimicking Apple and iOS with the attitude that since people are already familiar and comfortable with the Facebook interface, putting a GameStop store directly in Facebook will inspire more of them to buy video games. It’s an interesting approach for a retailer to take, especially since the GameStop Facebook store is nothing more than a modified (aka dumb-downed) version of gamestop.com.

And that’s where the problems start. Facebook seems to want to move into the retail industry, but I don’t think the comfort of Facebook is a big enough advantage over traditional shopping sites like GameStop and Amazon. Buying video games is hardly a social activity, and somehow I doubt my elderly relatives are suddenly going to get into Call of Duty just because it’s easy to buy on Facebook.

Yes, the idea of Facebook credits is cool when it comes to currency exchange and buying stupid stuff in FarmVille – but what advantage does it really have over buying a video game directly from GameStop’s website? Both ways require you to enter a credit card, and you could argue that Facebook is actually less convenient since you have to convert your money into credits before using them.

My point is this: the iPad is a wild success because it opened up the world of computing to a huge segment of the population that wasn’t invested in it before. I doubt the same will happen with Facebook’s retail system. Plopping replica websites into a Facebook page is not an innovation and does not provide any real benefit to the consumer.

With it’s stranglehold on social media, I have faith Facebook will find plenty of way to monetize its business – I just don’t think selling video games is one of them.

This week, Rupert Murdoch’s iPad magazine The Daily ends its free trial period and becomes a paid publication – although when lined up next to the NY Times pay wall, The Daily looks like a bargain at 99¢ a week.

The Daily received a lot of hype leading up to its launch in February, but once people actually got their hands on the app, interest seemed to putter. And puttering is not a good thing for a company trying to support a staff of hundreds of writers and editors. Some reports say only around 5,000 people had actually signed up for paid subscriptions as of last week.

Complaints from users are pretty wide-ranging: the app takes forever to download every morning, it’s clunky and sometimes difficult to navigate, the stories are too short and shallow, it misses a ton of breaking news. That list could go on a lot longer, but I’m trying to be nice since even digital magazines have feelings.

I don’t know how to solve all of those problems. I’m not even sure they all can be solved given the basic approach that The Daily has chosen. But there is one suggestion I have: stop publishing in the morning.

Think about it – the only reason we are accustomed to morning newspapers is because that’s the system that worked best for paper publications in the past. Newspapers needed to be an overnight business because of the time required for printing and delivering. The Daily faces neither of those limitations thanks to the iPad and the Internet, so why force the magazine to be a morning activity?

The numbers are on my side. Studies show that people do the majority of iPad reading between the hours of 5 pm and 10 pm. So for a lot of folks, the “fresh” copy of The Daily that they download in the morning ends up sitting on their iPad all day. Then when they finally have time to read it, the stories feel old and stale (just like those Cheetos you found underneath the couch).

Yes, we are living in a 24-hour news cycle. However, maybe its just my warped perspective or my east-coast bias, but it feels like the majority of news (other than sports) still occurs between the time the sun goes up and the time it goes back down. My recommendation for The Daily: switch to the network news schedule, spend all morning and afternoon gathering and reporting your stories, and then publish an evening edition at 5 or 6 pm.

Your readers will be getting fresher news at a time when they can enjoy it, but the benefits of the change wouldn’t end there. I’ve worked in a newsroom, and trust me, your staff won’t mind having a semi-normal work schedule either.

Don’t get me wrong. The iPad 2 looks like a fantastic device (except for the obnoxious bezel) and the early reports say it is frickin’ fast. It’s by far the best tablet on the market, and the Android and webOS manufacturers should be terrified about their own future.

With that said, there is not a cell in my voluptuous body that wants to own an iPad 2.

I had sour feelings towards the first generation from the very beginning, and over the past year, I’ve realized that my disinterest is not directed at the iPad specifically – rather, I simply have not bought into the idea of tablet computing.

My stance can be summed up in a single thought: you are either an iPad person, or a MacBook Air person. There is no in between. I see no conceivable way you could argue that a person would need to own both an Air and an iPad, because in terms of software, the two devices are not that different at all. They run the same types of apps and, in theory, can be used for similar tasks. The hardware is what causes the split between consumers. Do you want to navigate the interface using a traditional mouse and keyboard, or do you want to use a touchscreen because everyone tells you it is more intuitive and makes you look cool?

In the past, Apple management has condemned the idea that the iPad could “cannibalize” the company’s success in the laptop market. Yesterday’s announcement of the iPad 2 convinced me that not only is cannibalization a possibility, it’s inevitable.

Strangely, it was the debut of the Garageband app that sparked this fear of mine. Apple portrayed the program as both a fun experimental app for novices and a professional tool for serious musicians. That blew my mind. I was watching a man play a drum set by tapping a single finger on a 10-inch screen, and I was supposed to believe that this gimmick was actually the future of music composition. In that moment, Apple transformed (or at least tried to transform) the iPad from a gadget for media consumption into a device for creative creation.

You see, Steve Jobs didn’t describe the app as Garageband Lite or a mobile version of the iLife program that runs on Macs. He basically said – this is Garageband, and this is all you need. And to me, that’s a clear sign that the iPad is on track to compete directly with Apple’s own laptop models. iMovie has already made the jump to iOS, and it’s only a matter of time before the other main Mac OS X apps (specifically iPhoto) do the same.

Personally, I don’t think it’s going to work. I would guess a lot of writers, filmmakers and musicians will be attracted to the sexiness of the iPad 2 and buy it compulsively, but then at some point they’ll have to realize that the time they waste trying to type, edit and compose on the touch device is not worth it when those tasks are significantly more efficient on a laptop or desktop running Mac OS X.

Yet Apple seems very confident that, at some point in the future, it can convince the majority of people that the iPad is the only device they need. Jobs was actually pretty obvious about it – he called the iPad a “post-PC” device several times during his presentation. Perhaps I’m being resistant to change, but I just hope the post-PC era does not have to translate into the death of the Mac.