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Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

My seventy-year-old dad still isn't at ease with Windows after fifteen years of having Windows PCs at home, but he's a master of his iPad.

However, he still uses Windows for email and posting on the web, because he hates typing on the touch screen. He tried the keyboard I got him for the iPad, but it ended up gathering dust on a shelf somewhere. My dad might be stuck in the pre-computer age, but he isn't stuck in the pre-keyboard age. He knows what a decent keyboard is. The keyboard is one of those things that people don't want to give up.

The folks talking about the iPad being the PC for "normal people" are looking forward to a future where nobody except nerds uses a computer before the age of eighteen. It's premature to speculate what a computer for "normal people" ought to look like until the definition of "normal people" stabilizes. Technological and economic development is changing the definition of normal people every day.

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To your point, Steve Jobs made a similar comment at D8 -

Jobs: “When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people. … I think that we’re embarked on that. Is the next step the iPad? Who knows? Will it happen next year or five years from now or seven years from now? Who knows? But I think we’re headed in that direction.”

http://d8.allthingsd.com/20100601/steve-jobs-session/

One thing that I really appreciate about Steve Jobs is his honesty in these matters.

He could have ventured on saying that the iPad is the next step that would have been very marketingish. Instead of speaking in certainties he treats his own products with a respect for reality and critical thinking.

Just imagine if more CEO's would actually participate in honest discussion about their products like this.

I'm pretty sure that in the beginning all cars were cars.

Does _anyone_ bother to fact check on Hacker News?

The first cars were not trucks, they were carriages. And your 35 horsepower Mercedes in the 1900s was not being bought by farmers but was being purchased by wealthy urban dwellers. The word "truck" by itself did not even refer to a motorized vehicle until the 1930s. Cars started out as a post-agrarian weakly powered luxury good for passengers before they ever became heavy duty farm implements, SJ's narrative is backwards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck

Step outside of the reality distortion zone, please.

This is a good point, but the condescension really doesn't help.

Some of us appreciate bullshit-free communication.

I think we'll need a new input method in the coming proliferation of touch ui based devices. Something like the old quickwriting research project perhaps. I have no idea how one brings about a social skill change like that. I suppose Palm did pretty good with their writing system. But in any case, I think if you just look at the problem the answer is a new input method for this form factor. How you get people there I have no idea.

Good point, we really need a new text input method for a touch-centric world. On-screen QWERTY keyboards are inconvenient and especially slow. Something that allows for really fast typing using fingers only, no stylus should be required.

The lack of a good solution to that is the only thing holding me back from using a tablet. I'm mainly a producer not a consumer so I really need to be able to type text quickly...

seen Dasher? http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/

Nope, hadn't seen that one yet. Could be interesting, thanks.

Swype is still an on screen qwerty keyboard, but it's much much quicker. You can essentially mash the keyboard (swipe around haphazardly, actually) and get exactly what you want for longer words. Shorter words are trickier, but it's amazing at getting long ones correct, and thus makes typing much quicker and painless.

Does it work on larger keyboards? I would imagine that it works great in smartphone keyboards because the swipe distances are so short but on tablets the keyboards are nearly the size of a normal keyboard. I can touch type on those.

I don't really like word-completion based schemes (the first thing I disabled on phones was the T9 typing for SMS) for the following reasons:

- I type in multiple languages (both programming and human). Systems with word-completion are generally based on a single language and need a context switch and separate dictionaries.

- You have to be very alert to what appears on the screen. You cannot blindly/mechanically type something and be sure that you get what you want, unless you know the entire dictionary.

Yet for the first time normal people like your dad and my parents and other family members can figure most things out themselves. My dad have both iPad and iPhone and for the first time he figures out stuff on his own, he have had phones since they came out back in the late eighties always asked me about the most "easy" things. The input problem isn't solved yet but for most cases it just works.

Does this mean that ChromeOS devices netbooks and pcs are the PC for normal people? Time will tell I guess.

The friendly touch UI does help, but the real reason seems to be that iPad is a much simpler system compared to Windows or any other full OS.

Google is doing the same thing with ChromeOS: how simple can we make this thing while still being useful?

> The keyboard is one of those things that people don't want to give up.

Product idea #1 of the day: a clicky, compact Model-M-style keyboard for iPad. Extra plus points if it comes in Selectric colors.

I once met a “normal guy”: he was really really lonely.

Normal people are people you don't know very well.

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