Who knew it would come to this?

With iOS 5 and my recent installation of Mac OS X Lion, I’ve come to love Safari Reader and its Reading list.

With the latest update to Marco Arment’s Instapaper for iOS, however, we’ve become distant friends.

Many folks have applauded the latest updates to Instapaper with its fancy Flipboard-ish design changes as well as its social features.

Bleh.

What I loved about Instapaper was that it just did one thing and it did it well. I was able to store articles that I wanted to read later without much fuss. It wasn’t overly designed, or rather, was so well designed that it was all about the reading. I don’t care so much for finding out what folks are reading as well. And very rarely will I want to tweet about an article that I was reading.

Safari Reader allows you to load up a webpage in Safari, hit a button, and it creates this gorgeous minimal version of that page. No ads, no social links, no nothing. It’s fantastic to look at. It takes away all the junk and just lets you read. This feature works on iOS and on Mac as well.

Not only that, but you can also add pages to a Reading List for later. Hit a button on Mac to read it later. Fire up your iPad in the afternoon and that article is there as well. The presentation is far an away better than Instapaper.

Not coincidently, Safari Reader strips away all the fluff from Instapaper just as well as both strip away from busy websites.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a paying subscriber to Instapaper and have no intention of stopping my support.

However, Apple has created something that really harkens back to the beginning of Instapaper: simplicity that allows the reading to take first place.

I’m down with that.