The home computer as a cultural object is physically vanishing (2007)
contemporary-home-computing.org
contemporary-home-computing.org
Had it been a passing fancy, no doubt she would have done without the desktop, but it wasn't, so she got a tricked out desktop (intended for gamers, I think) and now has the most powerful computer in the house. She still uses her phone and (when in school) her Chromebook, but when she's in creator (not consumer) mode, she uses her desktop.
I can tell you it's simply superior to a Wacom tablet for drawing, there I have a direct comparison. A PC/desktop will certainly exceed an iPad at some level: but now that the Pro model has an M1, it's unclear at what level that is. I certainly don't edit at a level where the difference between Logic and LumaFusion becomes apparent, and I expect that Apple releasing Logic for the iPad is a matter of when, not if.
The iPad is also as expensive as a good laptop, so in more than one sense those two categories are converging.
I'm sure your daughter made the right decision for her, I'm just taking the opportunity to build on your comment with a bit more evidence that the home computer is a vanishing breed.
Doesn't the sandboxing and limited access to the file system get in the way?
Can you export video to non-Apple formats, collaborate with other people via a version control system, easily import footage from non-Apple devices, and so on?
Can you even cleanly separate your video editing project from your personal holiday photos/videos? (Does iPadOS expose a directory structure to the end user yet?)
No.
> Can you export video to non-Apple formats, collaborate with other people via a version control system, easily import footage from non-Apple devices, and so on?
Yes.
Why would it get in the way? Any video editing software on it's going to be designed with that in mind, and will share with other video-related software just fine. Lots of desktop video editing software (Premiere, to pick one) start with "OK, step 1, import all the clips/videos for this project into this program" so even in the worst case it's gonna look a lot like the same workflow as video-editors are used to, and those workflows exist and became the norm on desktop before iPads even existed.
> Can you export video to non-Apple formats
Of course. Why wouldn't you be able to?
> collaborate with other people via a version control system
Never seen it for video editing, including when I worked at a video production company, though that was years go so maybe version control's normal even for amateurs and small shops now? If it's around and popular I'd be surprised if there's not "an app for that" or it's not built-in to some of the higher end editing software on iPad. If things still operate like they used to then you're talking a NAS shared over SMB for largish projects, or Dropbox for smaller ones, for collaboration, probably, and both those are fine with iPads.
> easily import footage from non-Apple devices
Sure, why not?
How do plugins work on iOS?
LumaFusion has pretty nice integration with Frame.io, which is as close to something like GitHub for video as I'm aware of.
(Disclaimer: My day job is as an engineer working on LumaFusion.)
Can you explain how this squares with your other comment about how I couldn't possibly know how it works if I wasn't on the team who built it?
More familiar with iOS on iPhones though, but can't see how I'd do 'serious creative work' - which usually ends up involving large numbers of files that need keeping organised - on an OS that's traditionally tried so hard to hide the underlying file system from the end user.
And I've never tried connecting a camera or video capture device directly to an iOS device, so not sure what is or isn't possible in that area.
The 2TB memory is accounting for like half the cost there. You can get a model with less built-in memory and just use an external drive and the price drops down to like $1400.
I haven't found 256GB to be much of a limit in editing video, and I do shoot 4K. But I've only really worked with a couple hours of footage at a time, and I'm comfortable with keeping my "b roll" on my NAS. 512GB would probably be a better buy.
Is that too much to ask?
Only way I can see that not being the option to beat, is if your goal is to learn the UI (not the concepts or techniques) for pro-tier desktop editing software. Then, yes, of course you have to have a desktop. I think "non-starter" is overstating the case against the iPad, for the particular tasks and user-profile stated.
> video editing desktop with two large 27" monitors for $1k
I need to know where you're buying monitors.
Amazon has Sceptre 27" 1080p monitors for less than $150 right now. The two 4K ones I'm using of the same size/brand were about $250 as of October.
Your reference to the so-called Apple Tax makes that perfectly clear.
What I actually said is that I, personally, find it fabulous for video editing. I made it clear that I'm an amateur who doesn't make heavy use of any advanced features, and furthermore said that I'm sure that the daughter made the right choice for her.
You blew into my mentions getting mad about price tags, which I never mentioned. Your assertion that someone can get better performance than the M1 for $1K including two large monitors (high DPI?) is something I'd need to see backed up, because quite frankly I don't believe you.
The one thing I'm quite confident of is that the iPad is superior for drawing to a PC and Wacom tablet, because I've used both. I'm quite confident from your pugnacious and unpleasant reply that you haven't used an iPad for either video editing or drawing.
I have an earnest question, as I have had to resort to mounting an SMB share in “Files” app because iTunes is an insufferable PÓS: How can you access files on the device and transfer them to a computer, for example?
I think that proprietary platform limited software on iPad is not typically mature as a main video editor or DAW. I record audio and produce music, and while my iPhone and iPad are great for making midi sequences, and even though I CAN connect a usb audio interface, it’s clunky and the opposite of why I would use the device, aka on the train or away from home. I typically record my drum set or guitar or trumpet with a rather large setup involving a rackmount audio interface, hardware mic preamps of good quality, and let’s face it: drum sets are large.
I know many folks that use their tablet connected to their desktop DAW over the LAN to control parameters on a synth or effects processor. In live sound setups it’s a great remote. It’s not a replacement for a larger computer, and size and scale of peripherals and the tasks involved are large. The form factors have legitimately distinct purposes.
I gave it a sincere try, but the UX is so utterly subpar that it's simply not worth the time or effort anymore. The file management on iOS is atrocious: support by various editing apps is questionable at best, and even if it wasn't, it's incredibly slow. Waiting while importing high-res videos off SD media to the file system, then turning around to wait an equally long time for the media to get imported into your editor is extremely irritating. There's also not a lot of serious competition in terms of quality editing apps. It seems like everything other than Luma Fusion is gimped to the point of near-uselessness for anything but the most basic of cut-and-crop type workflows.
iPad did have a slight edge in terms of render performance and efficiency versus ultraportable notebooks like the MacBook Air for a brief period between the A12x-based Pro release in 2018 and the release of the M1 MacBook Air in 2020, but now that the M1 Air is on the table, it's well worth the few extra ounces to go with a M1 MBA for mobile video editing.
I believe you when you say it's infuriating to someone with formal training, used to the professional tools. I wouldn't know, this is how I've taught myself to edit video.
It's inferior and the software is cheaper. The hardware isn't necessarily, but it sure is if you own an iPad and don't have a dedicated machine for editing video.
And the experience is steadily improving, and at some point it might well "worse is better" the specialized hardware and expensive software which is the industry standard.
Or it might not. Time alone will tell.
It's worth pointing out that the current iPad Pro also has an M1, so the choice between an MBA and an iPad Pro is much less clear along that dimension.
I think the thing that frustrates me the most is that Apple has repeatedly failed to fix the performance and usability issues related to file management that have plagued iOS/iPad OS since the feature was introduced. Fixing the poor performance + increasing versatility of the file manager (or allowing 3rd party file managers like Android) would massively improve the editing workflow on iPads, and for me, would probably push it into the 'good enough' tier of performance that might lead me to leave my MacBook at home when editing video on the road.
Since video editing is no longer governed by literal machinery, it can deprofessionalize into a set of smaller consumer languages, though if you imagine all the forms of editing that exist, it's unlikely that we'll have total coverage anytime soon.
IMO, yes & no. For certain types of work, an iPad Pro is amazing. For direct sketching, drawing, for sure. It's easily my favorite drawing table for these.
For certain other types of work, for example: colorists work of filling large areas precisely within black lines (like comicbook coloring) or maneuvering around a huge document, a commercial grade Intuos tablet (or the like) is a better match.
One of the biggest reasons is that the Intuos has physical, raised "quick action" buttons which can be programmed to switch between tools, so you can zoom, rotate, brush, erase without ever looking at a keyboard or even looking away from the screen. This is crucial in certain workflows. Edit: also, the fact that your hand is never in the way on an Intuos is really key.
Admittedly, this is a very specific use case, but I figured I'd mention it for completeness sake.
They truly are. One thing I might also mention is that in my experience, the wireless connectivity is less than great for Wacom tablets. Way too much lag. I recommend using a wired tablet if at all possible. It may be that this is old advice, but I couldn't deal with any lag whatsoever when using one for hours at a time and disabled the wireless mode of my Intuos 4 (yes, it's quite old, but still works fine)
I have decades now (shit, I'm old) experience with these tyoes of devices in professional settings. There are two classes now, one with direct drawing over screen, the other indirect one. I have my brain and muscles trained for both, and I'd rather take the former than latter any day. It's more natural and in some cases necessary (hand-drawn animation is way slower by indirect method, if impossible).
Having said that, I'd only consider and compare three devices (there are more). Cintiq attached to a computer - fantastic experience and highly non portable and requires a lot of space. Allows for photoshop, which is still no 1, as well as pro 2D animation tools. Portable wacom/cintiq which is a pc in a fat tablet form.. not that great (heats up, battery, fat), but allows all wibdows tools you need.. and then there's ipad pro with its pencil. Procreate is fantastic and saves the show on the app front, apple pencil and screen surface is subpar experience to wacom nibs and surface (not cintiq one!!), but it takes like half an hour to get used to it and never give it a second thought. There are screen overlays which mimic wacom surface though, I just don't need it. Also, ipad pro has the advantage there of having less space between the tip of the pencil and the surface being shown (less of a gap between glass and drawing) and that amazing refresh rate is, well, amazing! I have "unlimited" budget for these things and my first tool to grab for drawing and painting is ipad pro. For animation and matte work (where you need different tools), it's cintiq on a windows machine (why not a mac is a different topic altogether).
Which leaves the Cintiq, and when I used one, I thought the screen quality couldn't touch the iPad, plus it's at least as expensive for a single-purpose tool. It wouldn't surprise me if the Cintiq's have caught up with iPad on that dimension now, my experience is about seven years out of date.
Just not i386 macOS, but x86-64 macOS came out in 2007, so you'd figure people would've been able to recompile since then.
-- Alan Kay
Non-slave adults are the vanishing breed, the onslaught against general and self-determined computing is just one of the symptoms of that.
Such a poor choice of words.
I loosely agree with your point, which I interpret to mean that generalized computing is endangered.
But it's endangered because the alternative experience is superior for most humans exercising their free choice.
It has nothing to do with slavery, or ignorance. This makes the problem much harder to solve.
Steve Jobs was right since most modern smartphones don't use styli. (Nothing against the Samsung S pen though.)
Alan Kay was right because the Apple Pencil is pretty great:
Generally this is just a marketing/SEO thing. A huge percentage of desktop hardware and accessories get the word "Gaming" slapped on the front even though they have nothing to do with gaming. Keyboards, mice, mousepads, headsets, speakers, monitors, cables, etc.
My about-to-be-a-college-junior daughter has been creating for years on an iPad, and she's pretty good at it. She's transferring to VCU this fall for their graphic arts program and we just set her up with a new MBP and a Wacom Intuos. She started to practice on it but finds the experience of the external tablet and viewing an image on screen much less appealing than drawing directly on her iPad.
For certain tasks, the iPad is superior input device.
Maybe someday the iPad won't be hobbled by iOS and it will be fully suitable for desktop tasks too.
(Currently typing this on an iPad air with smart keyboard.)
I just realized there's a program that turns your iPad into a tablet, Astropad, that seems worth a try.
* “Gamers” or other enthusiasts with their battlestations [1]
* Finace workstations with many monitors and Bloomberg terminals [2]
* Potentially musician workstations as well [3]
Any other niche ideas?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/battlestations/ [2] https://images.app.goo.gl/KfaJMqBp8JVkW6Yn8 [3] https://images.app.goo.gl/sVjkdWvKNrMN2xdD8
Solo studio tracking artist? Yeah, an iPad is probably good enough for you to practice with and do some rough scratch recordings for demo purposes.
If you're running a studio, you need the I/O to handle at least a few physical devices with dedicated PCIe lanes, and a high resolution input device like a mouse or trackpad to make precise edits in a DAW. Plus a keyboard. Audio/video editors love their keyboard shortcuts just as much as developers!
While it may be possible to connect any one of those devices to an iPad, connecting all of them and making it easy to disconnect the iPad, makes it impractical in reality. The iPad in it's current format is not a great device for professional audio recording and mixing, and if you changed the format to better fit that workflow, you've now described a Mac Mini and you should buy one of those instead.
Take away the monitors and the computer keyboard, substitute a couple of multi-track reel-to-reel tape decks, and it looks exactly like what I'd see when I'd visit my dad at his audio engineer job in the 1970s.
The computer itself is just an appliance, stick it under the desk next to the mini-fridge. Maximize the available surface used for getting the work done; as long as the computer's got enough airflow to not overheat when you push it hard, who cares where it is?
Well, gamers care I guess, they all have those crazy light-up cases with clear sides to show off how much they spent on their custom-built rig. The computer's become an object of desire there.
I've never succeeded making it anything but a deep green and it gives me a nice and fuzzy feeling, knowing that everything is at an optimal temperature while the fans lazily spin behind the tempered glass.
You could Quadro cards on laptops for a long time. They're just the super thick stupid expensive models usually.
The only person I know who has a bloomberg terminal uses a remote machine and just a laptop at home and he works from home. However he is not involved in day trading directly so maybe those would need desktop computers just for the graphics.... although maybe even that can be done via external graphics card since the processing power I think is already there on powerful laptops.... now I'm curious.
If I would not be a software dev I would ditch laptop/computer and go with mobile phone alone. For day to day reading/banking/mailing all I need is there.
I think I could go full mobile phone if I would have cloud server + cloud IDE because I can connect big screen to the phone with mouse and keyboard anyway. Only dev tools are not really accessible on Android/IOS.
Having everything I need to work on single device that allows me to jump on the plane and go anywhere, that is great idea. Well maybe I would need to carry a keyboard and mouse but I hope that screens will be available in every hotel room/office space with option to connect with a phone.
There are other programming jobs with different iconic setups.
There might be a market for rackmountable hardware with the much-needed addition of proper RGB lighting (for improved performance).
API requests when testing and so forth ... for whatever reason a separate set of physical keys makes more sense in my head.
I saw it recommended here a while ago, haven't tried it myself.
https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/keybow-2040?variant=32399...
I get the appeal, but I still have unused function keys. (I'm using.. off the top of my head, F1-5.)
You'll get 15-18 buttons you could remap to trigger whatever events you want.
On the ergonomics front, I have long wanted to try out foot pedals/buttons for Shift or a few triple key combo shortcuts I regularly use in my IDE.
I agree it’s a feature that’s disappearing, but if anything it’s because people are getting more personal computers, like a laptop or modern smart phone, than ever before.
Edit: on slightly closer inspection, this isn't true for the 27" models!
I blame Apple's product line branding for this confusion. I make the same mistake all the time.
However... they're QUIET. So unless they manage to fuck up the desktops completely, i'll be getting one. Not with the laughable current 16G RAM though.
Using your desktop remotely from a cheaper but more portable device is pretty much the same model (not the same thing, but model) as the way many people interacted with mainframes last century.
The only laptop I've ever owned that had good sustained performance was a Dell Precision workstation machine[1] which could run at quad core i7 full load at 3.8 GHz for hours thanks to its pair of massive internal blower fans.
[1] https://www.myfixguide.com/manual/wp-content/uploads/2014/05...
I'm probably a little eccentric but I really enjoy this a lot more than simply carrying a laptop around the house.
I have two (work issued) laptops, one that runs Windows and one for NixOS, both with SSDs that are too small for me to dual boot effectively. Then there are my two external monitors, my mechanical keyboard and mouse. I need a keyboard and mouse switch as there are an inadequate number of USB ports on the laptops and I want to share peripherals, USB-C hubs on the laptops to get video out to more than one monitor and also provide power simultaneously and read/write SD cards.
My desk is an absolute cluttered mess.
Minimalist laptops/tablets just end up producing more clutter for me, are hard if not impossible to upgrade, and tend to suffer from planned obsolescence. Now I don't need to travel to work every day, I'm happy to have a desktop at home and then use a co-working space with a Raspberry Pi when I do need to go into the office.
Bam! You now have a full normal desk to draw, paint, glue stuff, solder etc.
I live in a 2 bed apartment with a 3 year old. My desk is an Ikea Ivar shelf with the computer sitting on the highest shelf to keep it all away from my toddler...
Now, it just looks deranged and unreadable.
The web was supposed to just be a place anyone could put up a document with some links to other documents. Cheap, simple, easy, fast. Then some services cropped up to help make some of the frustrating parts easier and quicker, and eventually the "services" ended up eating the web alive.
Now with the corporate web, perhaps it’s no accident consumption devices have become so widespread.
I mean, this page is not simple, easy, or fast to develop. Instead of just writing a simple article, the author had to source/create at least 2 dozen images with no value only to lay them out on the page in the middle of paragraphs, making the article as hard to read as they could muster.
Enjoy the nostalgia and break from modern clean websites, but anything else justifying the look of this page is just crazy. And connecting it to modern services and the downfall of the internet or whatever just sounds like you're trying to be edgy.
We are in a massively better place now than a decade or two ago as far as the internet being accessible to everyone, both on the publisher and consumer side, despite the hate for big corps.
With flat screens, this isn't a thing anymore. (Also, the kind of despair that would urge someone to attack the machine, has become increasingly more abstract, as has the underlying architecture causing the despair. What would you do? Take a plane to hit "the cloud"?)
Phoned home to check with the Misses, and she said no, get 2 of them, one for yourself, and one for sproutlet.
Having a nice big screen really helped during the quarantine after getting sick, and the time after.
It doesn't really matter what your "computer" is, be it an old Mac Pro tower, or an HP laptop, the Monitor, real Keyboard and Mouse are what make a desktop these days. The old beige box is optional now, the rest isn't.
Meanwhile, I've moved back to desktops. If I ever need a laptop again it will be the lightest weight one I can get, and will use it to remote access my main machine.
I realize that the comments here will largely be filled with people variously proposing that one do EVERYTHING with the iPad, and folks opposed to that. As this article is from 2007 and desktops are not extinct may I humbly suggest that a tablet device SUPPLEMENTS and COMPLEMENTS desktop and laptop computers running “full featured” operating systems (ones that allow you to manage files conveniently, for example, or configure the system as you wish it to be).
The question is not so much about processing power, but of form factors. A PCI(e) based audio interface is still superior to a USB one in latency and jitter, commodity RAM in standardized slots as an easy consumer upgrade, one can speak of the physical space required for proper USB ports if OTG and a zillion fragile dongles aren’t going to work for you.
The vast majority of content creators that I know, (including myself) use a tablet in conjunction with a traditional computer form factor. They use the tablet variously as a remote control, as an input device, and as a portable idea capturing device. It doesn’t replace a sound or video studio, it’s a welcome addition to one.
It sat on the kitchen counter like an appliance / shrine.
What boggles my mind is that the industry accepts Apple's restrictions on what kind of computing can happen, how their software can be distributed, and how their gross/margins are taxed.
These devices have done a perverse thing to our field.
Consumers love them, but fuck are they awful for freedom, business, and small time success.
We used to build platforms in the open that we all benefited from (ie. the Web). Even Microsoft Windows was and is more open than these goddamn monopoly devices.
The DOJ needs to rip Apple's control of the iPhone away. It's not their device anymore. It's the industry.
Computing belongs to the people. It'd make for a healthier playing field, and Apple would still be making bank.
At the same time, the weighing of leverage is precisely how the market has and still works to this day. Thus if you send me out there to negotiate with Popeye's (which really wants you to create an account), or Walmart, Facebook, or even a small company making todo apps, I will simply not win, and neither will my family members. I love that cross-app tracking is now opt-in, because that's not something I'd ever imagine negotiating with any company, ever. I love the fact that all subscription-based services purchased through the iOS platform can be managed in a centralized place.
And I will of course resent in my tiny, futile, pathetic way, those voices which say "Well, you as a free agent made these concessions in the marketplace. Didn't you get what you deserve?"
Why can't there be a consumer choice to throw your weight behind a mega-giant who intercedes forcefully on your behalf, in a marketplace that is all about the weighing of leverage?
> The end goal was never really to empower people
whose end goal would that have even been?
you're talking like history possesses some sort of inherent narrative, instead of just being a bunch of people doing shit.