Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

The author does sound like a retro-grouch. As I often say to hipsters on fixies, “For you it’s retro, for me it’s nostalgia.” That being said, the post-PC era does not mean that nobody has a PC, it means that people don’t have to buy PCs to do non-PC things. Imagine if you needed a PC to watch television. It’s the same thing with email, FB, and web browsing. Why do I want to know how to format a hard drive to read Hacker News?

Steve Jobs described PCs as being like pickup trucks, and he described post-PC devices as being like all the other vehicles people use, from bicycles to SUVs. None of those made the pickup truck go away, and for that matter there is a sizeable market of people who take pride in driving a pickup truck even though they never haul anything bigger or dirtier than a chest of drawers in it.

PCs will be the same way. Available and cheap if you need one, and also available for those just like the status symbol of being a touch guy who fdisks and bash scripts and thinks curl beats Firefox.

the post-PC era does not mean that nobody has a PC, it means that people don’t have to buy PCs to do non-PC things.

Fewer people needing to buy PCs to do non-PC things means fewer people buying PCs. Fewer people buying PCs means fewer people exposed to the PC things early on. Fewer people who are familiar with the things that you use to make things.

Seems reasonably lamentable to me.

Well, suppose all you have is an iPad, and you want to write some code. Sad panda, yes?

Well, not necessarily.

Let's say you go plop down 50 bucks or whatever on a keyboard -- or maybe you don't because you have a bigger tolerance for trying to type code on an onscreen keyboard than I personally do.

Next, you have to locate yourself a web browser. And there's one right there on your iPad already, so you're done.

Next you have to find somewhere on the internet where you can do coding. Here's the first one I found from a quick Google search: http://www.coderun.com/ . It's a browser-based IDE for php or asp.net that allows you build, test, and deploy a website right from the comfort of your own browser. I'm sure there are other options out there, but I didn't look very hard.

So it doesn't seem like you're going to have to work very hard to find a way to learn to write code as long as the web browser doesn't go anywhere. Even on an iPad.

This is like telling me that it's lamentable that I can't fix a car. Had I been forced to spend many waking hours tuning and maintaining my car, I would have learned something.

Well, I spent those hours programming, and the people who love cars are using the time saved by their iPad to tinker ith internal combustion engines and electric vehicles.

Who's forcing whom to do anything? Why is having the option to do something such a bad thing? Windows gives its users plenty of opportunity to tinker. Most of them don't bother. With the ipad, however, the option itself is taken away.

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