Coding Horror - Welcome to the Post PC Era
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Of course pending a convincing replacement for the keyboard and mouse I'm not sure how long it is until we see this in office environments.
However I don't necessarily equate Post PC = Tablet , there will be other devices that fit other needs.
Eventually either somebody invents a great way to write on these devices, or I'll finish my visual programming project (see http://noflojs.org). Then (and only then) I can see my laptop usage starting to near zero.
When I think about a program in my head I basically construct it as a huge mental diagram anyway and then translate it into code. Perhaps detailed visual design is the way to go.
You don't discuss philosophy with flowcharts; why should you code that way?
I'm not necessarily suggesting that you entire program will be converted to a diagram overnight but it might be an interesting way to declare general structure.
They're still just expensive toys. And I really, really mean that.
Have I ever received an email from someone using an iPad?
Nope. Not once.
Has anything I've looked at online in the last week been created on an iPad?
Nope.
Post-PC? Try post-TV.
When you stop insisting that iPads are toys and start just using them, it's pretty incredible what you can do. Can you do everything on an iPad? No. But that doesn't mean you can't do anything.
(And I bet something you've looked at online over the past week has been created on an iPad... hell, this comment has been created on an iPad.)
For example, my non-tech girlfriend has had an ipad for 6 months now and the only time I've ever seen her use the computer was for word processing and creating presentations. "Office" kind of stuff.
The iPad isn't designed for user like us. It's designed for casual, everyday uses: like your mom.
i.e. for work. Laptops/PCs are for working, tablets are for playing -> little more than expensive toys, in the same way your TV was. Are tablets replacing TVs? Absofuckinglutely. Are tablets replacing work laptops? Not a chance.
And I think the "expensive toy" trope is pretty passe at this point. I have an IDE (AIDE) running on my phone, and since it's a Droid 4 with a keyboard, it's really pretty usable for projects of modest size. And the debug cycle is ridiculously easy, unlike running a phone emulator on a PC.
The fact that you have to jailbreak an iPad to be able to write code you can run locally seems like a defect to me, but that doesn't mean the tablet form factor is a waste of time, just that the iPad is not my particular cup of tea.
And iPhoto, iMovie, and the myriad of music applications provide the opportunity to do all sorts of creative work on a lightweight device that gets fantastic battery life.
I'd say that's more than enough to take it out of the toy category, and into the "very affordable PC substitute for many applications" category.
(This comment was written on an iPad while relaxing on a comfy chair. You can tell because I'm not using typographically correct apostrophes.)
I have. My father, my mother, my aunt, my best friend, one of the most skilled software engineers/architects I know, an engineering manager I work with, several members of mailing lists I'm on... Oh, and I send email from my iPad occasionally, though I'm still more attached to my laptop than most people. I've been too busy to adapt my workflow.
You cite content as creation as a reason why we're not in a post-PC era, but I think you overestimate what most PCs are used for. What percentage of PCs are used to create online content anyway? Also, how do you know you haven't received an email from an iPad or seen a Facebook photo uploaded from an iPhone. You're extremely dismissive, but the proof will be in the numbers. Certainly post-PC is overhyped as a meme, but tablet sales growth is astronomical. If trends continue for any appreciable length of time, it will be impossible to deny that tablets are dominating every-day computing.
I'll agree that this is they key difference. I'm sure that my ideas of computers are good for - there value to society - is different to most users.
Perhaps what really gets me is the idea that the tablet 'revolution' is necessary leading us to a better place. One day we might look back fondly at the 'family computer' that sat in the living room, where someone discovered a love of programming, or creating movies, or whatever. Stuff that other less 'general purpose' devices don't do.
Hmm.
email, how... quaint.
And TV? I think I watch video on my iPad perhaps once every couple weeks. And then its likely just a 3 min Vimeo clip. My iPad is absolutely a work device; it's in fact my full on-the-go work solution.
For post-PC, I think the important metric is how much more time are people spending on their tablets and phones vs. their PCs rather than whether or not they still own a PC.
I used to use my laptop all the time. Browsing the web, social web jerk-offery, entertainment on planes, whatever.
The iPad has pretty much replaced my laptop entirely for casual computing. I barely use it these days. Mostly it gets dusted off for looking at porn, since Flash isn't coming to mobile. And even now, that's becoming less and less an issue as more content distribution – adult and otherwise – moves to H.264.
Laptop is still good for designing things, for writing code, cutting video, whatever. But I'm quite impressed by how thoroughly the iPad has replaced it for the majority of use cases. And that's how it works. It doesn't happen overnight. It creeps. I didn't immediately stop wearing watches when the cell phone became ubiquitous. But eventually it was a no-brainer.
Oh, well, looks like you're stuck in that ol' pc era after all...
The big problem is the workflow sucks – importing images to the iPad from an SD card can be pretty slow. And fiddly, since you need to hold onto an adaptor. Wonder if there's an iOS client for any of those WiFi-enabled SD cards. Wouldn't help with speed but maybe the ease-of-use would make up for that.
Part of the "Post PC" era, that I'm starting to grok, is also entering the "Cloud" era. Data that is not connected, or highly mobile, is much, much less valuable in that world than it used to be.
Huge (HUGE!) opportunity for an SLR with dead simple and fast streaming into the cloud/photostream/iPad.
The iPad is sort of like buying a scooter when you live in an urban area. If you already have a car you might not get rid of it, but you drive it a lot less and when it comes time to be replaced, its worth is now a conversation instead of a sure thing.
Linux has traditionally maintained support for older hardware - through driver support, forums to answer questions, and Linux installations that are snappy even on old hardware.
Actually, I see desktop computing (including laptops) hitting a plateau already just from being good enough (factor in Windows XP's decades-long lifetime).
Arguably if desktops are plateauing, embedded devices will follow a similar trajectory on a shorter time scale - all the hard-knock lessons are already known.
Ultimately the year of the Linux desktop won't happen - but businesses will face fast-shrinking margins for desktops, laptops, and per-seat software licenses.
The iPad is an order of magnitude more simple than OS X or Windows, which are themselves quite a bit more user friendly than Linux.
I think something like Chrome OS is a more likely business target than Linux (thin client-ish and mostly web/cloud based).
However, people do switch to Linux all the time because "Windows got too slow."
If you bought a new PC 6 years ago it probably has a dual core CPU , 2GB+ of memory , a 100GB+ HDD and some hardware accelerated graphics.
In other words enough to comfortably run Windows 7, Office, Chrome and even Photoshop.
There are still plenty of workplaces around where computers are still predominately Pentium 4s.
At work, for that entire 8 year stretch, I've done 100% of my network diagrams/power points/Boring-office-stuff on a Dell Precision 650 with a grand total of 4 GBytes of ram (That was a lot back in 2013) running (and still running) windows XP.
I think _that_ has a lot do with why AAPL is now roughly double MSFT.
For them, they have never written a line of code, their work doesn't require them to change a computer but it does require that they communicate, schedule meetings, take pictures, exchange data. For them a 'phone' is not enough and a laptop is a bit too much.
The market for computers has many components, one component is the engineer / programmer / scientist. Their use of computers is like their use of calculators, they always have one somewhere. But there is another component to that market which is much larger which are the people that are forced to use computers because businesses don't use the yellow pages, or have catalogs, or answer customer support calls, or deal with people on a face to face way.
For that segment of people the iPad is a total win. They can look things up on the web, they can order from Amazon, they can keep in touch with their friends, and they can fill out forms etc. They will have a PC in their den or something for a while and when they haven't turned it on in 6 months they will put it out with the other junk at their next garage sale.
Now it becomes a hassle to carry all of these docks and accessories around with you so you think "gee , I wish somebody could invent something that combined my screen, keyboard and mouse into one unit..."
Another point to bear in mind is that whilst people will have computers at work and at school a great many people , especially students will want to do work from home.
People do not just base their requirements on what they need 99% of the time, but rather on what they forsee their possible needs might be.
Let's take cars for example, how many people do you know that own medium to large size cars with 5 seats and a trunk where for 90% of their daily driving the car only contains the driver , possibly one passenger and an empty trunk?
To exploit your analogy (cars are always good for that :-) how many people own trucks these days? There is always a market for a truck, its the best selling unit of Ford's inventory, but people who only occasionally move stuff or carry stuff often will borrow or rent a truck when needed rather than own one)
The other interesting part of this conversation is the conflation of cause and solution. Your point 'especially students will want to work from home' is particularly salient. When I was a student the PC didn't exist, I still worked fine from home :-) But more importantly as the presence of PC's in the home grew, teachers gave students the opportunity to do work on them rather than say writing it out long form, etc. But as tablets become common at home and with students, and especially tablet based text books, the opportunity to provide even better tools for students is possible.
Imagine a world where your history home work is to write an essay on some topic in the text book that is also on your tablet. Writing an essay is pretty trivial mechanically, you don't mouse a lot and you can do the whole thing even from a soft keyboard.
And this comment for me really sums it up : "People do not just base their requirements on what they need 99% of the time, but rather on what they forsee their possible needs might be."
This is spot on, and there are many people who are looking at tablets and deciding that it can cover even their foreseeable needs. And that, for me at least defines, the term 'Post PC', when something other than a PC can meet the extant and foreseeable needs of someone with respect to information communication and manipulation.
I think the precision and speed advantage you get from a proper keyboard and mouse setup vs a touchscreen, especially when you consider how cheap both of these items are will mean that they are around for some time even if it as an optional add-on rather than a core part of the whole interface.
I see the "post pc" as more of a rethink of the PC minus the general historical baggage that various versions of Windows etc have carried with them for last 20 or so years.
What I think people are really clambering for is a better user experience from their software.
Let's take the filesystem as an example.
Years ago it made sense to have an OS with the concept of files and folders being exposed to the user.
Why? Because you needed to be able to group your stuff together, either things for a particular project or because they were of a particular file format (word documents , spreadsheets etc).
You would also have "drive letters" which told you whether it was on the "C drive" (inside the computer) or the "A drive" (portable). This is no longer important since we can trivially sync most things to the internet regardless of where the bits are physically stored. In fact Unix doesn't even have the concept of drive letters at all.
File formats can now easily be replaced by Mime types and meta info since fast SSDs and indexes can be used to search either the device itself or cloud storage very quickly. This means it is easy to have an app that loads and immediately provides a list of all the documents which it can work with.
The only requirement that is left is the "grouping", folders are pretty bad for this because you can only group in one dimension. A better system might be some form of "tagging" for example tagging as "work" or "my project" etc.
By removing the filesystem from the user's consciousness you have already massively improved usability and I think this is probably the biggest thing that has made the iPad so easy to use because it essentially turns the install process for an application into a 1 stage thing. Combine this with having updates automatically install silently in the background and an application ecosystem built around the idea of the internet and web as a first class citizen in the OS rather than an extension of it and you have a very seamless experience.
The physical "input into the device" landscape though I see as something blown open and I really don't think there needs to be one dominant paradigm here.
These days the only time I need Office is when some idiot sends me a document in one of their proprietary formats. But taking your point to be the more general "word processing / spreadsheet " market (since I don't feel like the data base aspects really caught on mainstream) I observe that there are fewer and fewer documents that are 'word processed'.
What is perhaps more relevant, is that I have tools available on the iPad that are at least as functional as using a typewriter to type up something (the pre-Office world) And if I absolutely must type rapidly on the iPad there are keyboard solutions out there. But I don't think I am compelled by the argument "You can't do Office[1] therefore you can't get rid of your PC."
What I do see is people using a device for all of the things they used to use a full blown computer for, knowing that those same people never exploited half of what their computer could do. And much of that has been driven by the notion that there is "one thing" which you use to do this stuff. A wedge was driven in that notion by 'smart' phones, and a bigger wedge is being driven into that notion by tablets.
[1] "Office" here is of course a stand-in for a variety of capabilities which one might classify as 'information manufacturing'
Project Managers and Business Analysts are another category of people who rely on MS Office heavily as well.
Programmers may not.
I don't think anyone expects that general purpose personal computers are ever going away, but there is a pretty compelling argument that the bulk of computational assets will fall into the 'appliance' category rather than the 'general purpose' category.
As Atwood points out, Microsoft strove to have a PC in every house, and they succeeded! PCs have higher penetration in homes than TVs. However, given tablets and their capabilities, it is looking more and more likely that this trend will stop and that the number of homes without a PC in them will begin to rise again. its an open question how many homes that will be but it seems likely it will happen.
There is little stopping them from using newer tools but inertia.
They don't need Office. They are just used to it, much like accountants are used to their 12C's
Now most students are being trained to use Office at school.
I use to see the world from an "Open Source" programmer's point of view: "You have the choice to use OpenOffice". But then after I saw the reality for a while, things start to sink in and it becomes obvious that people don't want to be liberated the way I thought they ought to be.
People are OK with MS Office. It becomes a piece of software that, no matter how hard geeks want to argue about the Pareto Principle or not, will stood the test because people were being trained regardless its complexity.
So yeah, from "feature/functionality" perspective, there are alternative. But from skill-wise, willing-to-learn aspect, there aren't until Universities and/or schools start teaching young people to use something else.
OTOH another argument is: you don't need the other alternatives if you have Office.
A person close to me is currently taking Accounting courses and calculator + paper do not cut it. You need Excel.
EDIT: I don't care for MSFT, I loathe Word. But Excel on Windows is a genuinely fine tool -- overused by a lot of people b/c the Windows anti-pattern keeps them from proper tools, but still a really useful piece of work. You can't do detailed modern financial analysis without it. The alternatives -- Linux, Google Docs, even Excel on Mac -- aren't even close.
What some courses teach is not financial math - it's "how to get numbers out of a 12C". This is just perverse.
It's limitations are outweighed by how fast you can do cut and dice data, including pivot tables (ie, basic OLAP). Google Docs is still too limited (ie, try filtering and sorting on multiple columns).
If you know of a way I can do this in a desktop or web-app for the entry price of Excel (free would be nice, but I don't mind paying), I'd be happy to know.
Tablets are good for certain use-cases, but when it comes to typing to save your life (i.e. your business), they are simply not a match and will likely never be. Couple that with the small screen real estate (spreadsheets these days are enormous), and you see how the iPad can be taken seriously only by the detached upper echelons who play golf all day. The rank-and-file will keep asking for (lighter) laptops forever more.
Take a step back, and really consider how likely it is that laptops are FOREVER. It might be true, but things change and I think it's historically much more likely that ANYTHING you point a finger at today will be transformatively replaced in due time, than it is that you'll be able to accurately predict a permanent future for whatever an ultrabook is.
I actually don't have any idea what an ultrabook is, but it sounds like a very small idea... not something I'd bet on or invest in for the very long term.
Touchscreens are fundamentally limited by the size of your finger. Firstly because you have to physically press the UI element you want to interact with. Secondly because your finger obscures whatever's underneath.
Of course, you can get around this by decoupling the physical location of the UI element and the physical location of your finger. It's called a trackpad.
Touchscreens are great for some tasks. But they are not great for tasks involving high information densities (writing, spreadsheets, mostly anything that can be classified as "editing"). For those, people will continue to use keyboards and mice until they evolve cone-shaped transparent fingers.
As soon as they start to get over the 11-to-13'' form factor (and lower in price), they're going to replace the current generation of work laptops. They'll get thinner and thinner; as batteries and bluetooth-like technologies improve, sooner or later they'll even lose USB ports, and you'll be left with a device that is literally a screen and a keyboard. Some models will have a detachable tablet screen, no doubt, but the heavy lifting will still be done with a real keyboard.
I don't think it will change tomorrow. But I could see the home market making the shift, gradually. Where the business market will be fifteen years from now we'll have to see.
1. Every office in the world will buy each employee a separate office room so they can dictate their documents without being disturbed by the other employees.
2. Every office in the world will buy each employee a $10 physical keyboard.
I don't think most folks would end up working from home 5 days a week -- there are still things that work better face-to-face. But I could see folks _only_ coming in for face-to-face time.
I've shared this anecdote several times on HN, but my parents bought iPads instead of laptops for travel.
Or do you want to know when the average user can sync her music library/podcasts to an iPhone without a desktop?
Spotify (or even just iCloud) + a podcast app like Downcast meet the needs of average users today.
To subscribe to iTunes Match
Launch iTunes 10.5.1 or later on your computer. You cannot subscribe to iTunes Match from an iOS device.
Personally I get my music onto my Android phone with a MOG subscription, and I sync a number of other things with Dropbox.
For just $24.99 a year . . . hmm no.
If the PC remains as ubiquitous as the radio did, it won't really be a "post PC era", it will just be an era with a greater diversity of computing devices.
Look at this graph: http://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/index.cfm
More than one third of US households have more than one PC. It’s probably a good assumption that most US households with iPads will keep at least one PC, but it’s very possible that many households are replacing their second or third PCs with iPads. After getting an iPad many households might not replace their kitchen or living room PC once it breaks. Maybe kids will get an iPad instead of a cheap laptop.
It would actually be very interesting to look at that question more closely. I’m not sure whether there is already data out there.
I think it’s important to emphasize that for the iPad to supplant PCs, people don’t have to ditch every PC they own. Many own more than one.
Doesn't follow. The question is how technology is affecting people's lives, and the answer, for now, is: immediacy and ease of use. For you, the iPad is a Unix machine with no file system and no shell. For a normal person, it is a magical way to share high-quality photos and talk with people across the world. That may not be very high tech, but it's currently holding together human relationships and families that otherwise wouldn't, and ultimately that's what is making an impact.
... because pens and paper are still around, and still useful for lots of things, even though some of the things they were used for in the past are now done on the computer.
Just like PCs are still around, and still useful for lots of things, even though some of the things they were used for in the past are now done on a tablet.
Now if he'd said that we were in the tablet era, that's another thing.
Sure we do. http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=paperless&y...
Tablets won't make anything obsolete, let alone desktop computers.
If you have a full size keyboard with the number pad on the right side, in Windows, you can open Calculator|View|History, and you have a digital adding machine right on your computer.
My Dad is now retired. He was a big PC guy and had various PC portables not a few of which were tablet convertibles. Today, he has an iPad and doesn't use anything else. He can e-mail, look at pictures, browse the web, and keep track of his bank accounts. It also makes for some decent entertainment for his grandson (my nephew).
We both started at much different places, but the Post-PC era has arrived for him, and I am one of those people who needs the trucks just as some still need bigger iron.
(I'm a Mac user and I find myself spending a lot less time on tech support type issues than back in the day when I was using Linux and Windows, still it's hard to deny that iPads are currently the epitome of simplicity, compared to their power.)
And that's what I'm worried about: "No user serviceable parts inside". I'm concerned the very reason tablets will take over the PC market will also mean that tomorrow's kids' experience is very different from, and I would argue poorer than, my experience when I got my first computer, a Commodore VIC 20.
Ironically, my VIC 20 also was very user friendly. You turn it on, it's on. You put in a diskette -- well, it didn't load automatically but making it load was a very simple incantation, and once the game started, it was started. Things were simple and worked, for the most part, quite well. No tech support needed. But the BASIC shell was there right at your fingertips -- hell, the manual came with example BASIC programs.
Quibbling over the merits of BASIC aside, it was a simple experience but it was also tremendously open.
Things got much more complicated since then; network connectivity in particular introduced previously unknown threats to users, so of course this is a simplified comparison. Still, I wonder, is giving up the freedom to tinker with the system really the price tomorrow's consumers will have to pay in order to buy simplicity?
And if you're thinking about replying with links to IDEs running on the iPad: no, something that runs in the cloud and has no direct access whatsoever to the internals of the machine does not qualify as a modern-day replacement for this experience, no matter how sophisticated.
Tablet and PC simply correspond to two totally different use of media. A tablet is consumption centered whereas the PC is able to produce complex goods and services than then can be consumed by a tablet. Will the tablet push away PC usage to very low level in some areas? Probably! Will it replace a PC for every usage ? Are you kidding me: Development, 3D Effect, Advanced Audio Processing, Advanced Photo processing. That's just as stupid as saying that photoshop is dead because Instagram can do sepia...
PS: I will absolutely never buy a tablet, I fight every day to stay on the creator side of society, with a tablet I would just give up!
[1] http://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-...
iPad 2 (16Gb, WiFi)
Apple wireless keyboard
Stilgut adjustable angle stand/case
iSSH
Linode 512 running Ubuntu 11.04
Apple VGA adapter
This is basically the same configuration as an iMac! I'll take an example, most of the programmers I know when doing some serious coding have 2+ monitors because it's always good to run on the side, get the result live. Or just because you need to compare two files. On such a small screen, it's close to impossible. Also for a programmer a lot of the wasted time is browsing through long files, with an ipad and, again, a small screen = nightmare.
Wonder how he is getting on with it?
I wouldn't call it a war, but Atwood (who, by the way, is neither an evangelist nor a journalist with an agenda) makes the point that tablets are about to take over large shares of the PC market. And my point was that this way, people (non-hackers) get even further removed from the "close to the metal" experience that I and others in my generation used to have.
With all respect, I think you and dozens of other posters in this thread are missing the point by "defending" the notebook and saying it won't get fully replaced. Of course it won't, but that's not an interesting question. The interesting question, in my mind, is: how can we avoid the TV-ization of computing? How can we make sure future generations don't equate a computer with a consumption device rather than a productive device? How can we make sure they can find out that this "magical device" isn't actually driven by fairy dust? Whether or not some share of the population uses notebooks, when the default for the millions and billions of non-hackers out there is to use a tablet, doesn't matter very much at that point.
Fortunately there are initiatives like the Raspberry Pi. It's telling that one of the main initiators of that project, David Braben, is also an old-school guy who grew up with computers in the 80s. Or so I'm guessing -- at any rate, he wrote some of my favorite 80s games, Elite and later Frontier. But I fear that if you plot the Raspberry's sales curve into Atwood's graph it won't look anything like the iPad.
The question is what the difference will be between the consumption devices and the production devices.
Whether the devices for creating content become specialized pieces of equipment priced out of reach of the general market and you get to touch one for the first time when you turn 18 and start your computer science course or perhaps with increasing viability of virtual machines you simply download a program that gives you all of your power tools but inside a sandbox so if you mess it up you can just re-image and go again.
There will also be as you suggested "hacker hardware" like the Raspberry Pi, I think the key for these is to make sure the costs are low and that they are available to kids in school.
The "hacker spirit" can overcome many obstacles. Hell in the 70s nobody had a computer at home and the original hackers used to break the law by breaking into companies computer systems via telephone lines just to play around with them.
My concern is just that the lure of simplicity (and parent's paranoia) will mean that kids will be more likely to end up with a closed system rather than an open one, and consequentially deprived of the ability (and, more importantly, the inspiration) to tinker. But maybe you're right that hacker souls will always seek out systems that allow them to do what they want to do, and it won't make a difference in the end. I hope so!
Most people in my peer group at the same time were only allowed limited access to their home computers and often were not allowed to install any programs on them etc.
Really though, I think it is in the governments best interest to make sure that kids are inspired to tinker with things if we want to stay competitive with BRIC countries in terms of creating and innovating.
I can only speak as a British person here but I think that from Alan Turing to BBC Computers (and now raspberry pi) etc , the "hacker mentality" is very much a part of our national DNA and it would be a great shame if that was lost.
It's maybe a philosophical question but who doesn't have an agenda? I mean when you buy a device, don't you want to convince the other that you haven't bought a stupid toy or a useless object? Everybody has an agenda, even someone just buy an iPad he has incentives to convince that his device is great, the only ones who don't have an agenda are the ones who genuinely don't care.
I have an agenda, I am trying to push people to see computers as something else that a tool to consume media/ slack around. But from the current design of tablets, especially Apple's iOs Devices it's getting really hard to see something else than a "pure-consumption" product.
To continue on the philosophical level, I think humans deep down aspire to do very little while receiving a lot of pleasure. The most productive of us have managed to channel this desire towards building systems that, when they will be working, will provide us with a lot of rewards with little additional work (the startup!). In a way the self-driven programmers have achieved a Post-Slacker era in their mind and god knows how hard it is to keep that up. The iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch/Android Phones are enabler of the slacktivist part in everyone of us, and that's one of the big reasons of their success.
Sure Raspberry Pi is great but, again, it's in the realm of post-slacktivism and thus it will probably NEVER be popular. It doesn't mean it won't be successful.
I hope this comment will find interested minds!
"I'm pretty sure this is the direction all OS's we will be using are going to end up in the coming years. Some people will cry and yell and holler that there is no way something can be made for both keyboard, mouse, and touch screen. I see this as simply a failure of vision. That's absolutely the way things are going to be going, and it's coming sooner rather than later. (I actually think the OSX launchpad is pretty close to allowing this implementation) Devices are getting smaller and smaller. I use a Mackbook air. but guess how it gets hooked up at home? That's right, wireless keyboard and mouse, nice big monitor, I never see the actual computer. It's only a matter of time before my laptop gets replaced by a tablet that has comparable hardware specs. The OS allow for my normal desktop interfaces, along with a nice touch screen interface. I'll use it to pick out movies to play on my TV, from my couch. I"ll use the same device to write code at my desk (with big monitor and keyboard). My kids will use it to play video games, both mobile, and on the TV. I'll use it to send email in the backseat of a car moving at 65mph. (As a wireless comms guy, I fully appreciate the technology it takes to perform that last action.) But the bottom line is, It's going to happen. Sooner rather than later."
I guess my point is, mobile and desktop can blend perfectly. Those that don't need a monitor or keyboard won't get one, devs and graphics guys will. Technology will keep the size of processing power shrinking. Could you ever imagine something as small as an MBA being a full on computer.
Last bit, and my only reservation of this whole "movement", is that, I hope they keep it more open, more like OSX, vs overly walled garden a-la IOS. But the signs are there, I think it can be done, and done very well, it's only a matter of time.
edit: It seems you biggest problem address the issue that these devices are built for consumption rather than creation. And I'll agree, that's my biggest reservation about the mobile concept. I guess I could have been more clear about that. I'd like my iPad (not that I actually have one) to be more like OSX, where I can hook up a monitor and keyboard, and go to town on my OS. While being able to switch into the "launch pad" mode while mobile.
Apple's devices (and other embedded devices) will never replace PC's - and exactly for the reasons you state. Thus the Raspberry Pi and the PC (PC platform) have a bright future.
Apple's devices will live until Apple EOL's them.
No he doesn't. He says that everyone now owns a PC, so innovation is moving to post-pc devices.
I think the term "post-pc" causes many geeks to project a vast ethical struggle onto the tablet market. Chillax, game consoles didn't kill off programming, this is no different.
Personally, I prefer the term "portable device" but I guess that's not as link-baity.
The iOS locked-down norm will likely migrate to the conventional computing world. Mountain Lion's Gatekeeper software establishes default behavior of not being able to run unsigned software. This gives Apple the power to censor software and is the a step towards App Store-only software on the desktop.
And that will lead to more open platforms being where consumers find the most innovative software, as well as being where commodity software is cheaper and/or better because competition will necessitate it.
Locking down your platform to prevent crapware that users don't want getting onto it is one thing. Locking down your platform when noncrapware that users do want is also available but only one someone else's gear is how you turn Apple back into being what they were before the iPhone: a footnote.
Of course, this does mean those developing for more open rival platforms will have to actually produce noncrapware, not the poor excuse for software many places ship today. It's about time our industry grew up and stopped pretending that shipping junk and charging for it is acceptable anyway.
Let's say your OSX is locked down, but you can get a virtual PC app from the store that allows you to install Linux without affecting your OSX setup.
Now you can use your Linux VM to program anything you want and share it with a whole community of others who run Linux inside a VM.
Perhaps at this point this whole community grows big enough that it becomes the main target market for companies who produce "power user" software.
Now, Tim Cook has shown a good track record of undoing the most extreme abuses from Steve Jobs megalomania (you supporting employee charitable contributions, paying dividends to investors, admitting imperfections in factory working conditions), so there is hope that he will do the right thing for humanity with this issue too.
With its USB ports, video acceleration, web browser... The RPi has more in common with a PlayStation than a BBC Micro.
Why do we need to concern ourselves with this? The Desktop already is "tv-ized" for most home users. People who are interested in producing will continue to do so but the majority most likely never will be and trying to make them will only turn them against us further. We should just get out of their way and make it as easy as possible to do what they want to do.
So, who knows what the future holds for the cost of content creation... Again people often ignore the long-term externalities they produce when they make their choices, buying a PC or a tablet being one of these choices.
I bought an iPad and I don't think that it's going to affect distribution of software in any meaningful way, besides making it easier for developers to reach users through the app store. For one, anyone can deploy an app to Heroku for free. You can host plain html, css, and js for free. You can learn how to program an iOS device for free with tons of great guides and materials online. When you want to distribute it, there is a hurdle to clear, but (and this might be a cultural thing), $100 as a 12-15 year old is not such a wild sum. It also makes my experience browsing the app store better.
You only need to register in the iOS Developer Program if you plan on distributing your apps in the App Store.
And for families that live check after check, they often have a computer but affording a $100 license can be very painful, I was in that situation!
When I was first looking at computers a computer cost $1000 and a copy of MS C++ was something like $300
I absolutely disagree. When I was 12 (in 1994) I became interested in Linux because it had so many development tools available. I thought computers and programs were magical, and Linux/bash/Perl/gcc et al. made it possible for me to learn programming. And Slackware Linux could be obtained for 10 guilders or less.
My generation became hackers through GNU and Linux, just as the generation before used MSX, C64, or a ZX machine with a free BASIC interpreter.
IMO, the sickening development is not so much that Mac and iOS developer accounts cost $99 per year. It's that the world (Apple and Microsoft) is slowly moving to a model where there is a gatekeeper who decides what gets in and what does not. As a bonus the gatekeeper gets 30% of every purchase. I can sympathize with the need to provide a 'trusted' source of software, but it should also be possible to install whatever the heck you like.
What would the Internet be if it followed this model?
So I imagine that would have been quite a large hurdle for somebody with a casual interest in learning to program to jump through in 1994, I also remember paying somewhere in the region of $100 for my Linux distribution then (SUSE I think).
Even at the point you had installed it , you would be compiling binaries with GCC that would have targetted Linux/glibc etc so you wouldn't have been able to share many of your creations with the rest of world apart from a slim minority of Linux users.
I'm not sure what the best compromise between having a "trusted" source of software is and being able to install what you want.
Most people seem quite happy with the app store lock-in, in fact most people I know who own android devices are not even aware of it's sideloading feature, they just get stuff from android market.
Of course if Apple become over restrictive then they do risk damaging their own ecosystem to the benefit of competing platforms.
Unfortunately there does seem to be more popular support that I had previously expected for the Internet to develop something closer to this model. I recently watched a documentary on cyber-bullying in which groups of parents were calling for an authority from government to be able to control the content of social networking websites as well as remove any anonymity from the Internet.
X was no worry - our machine only had 4 MB of RAM, so I was practically forced to use pseudo-terminals. The learning curve for Linux distributions was not that steep. Slackware, especially in those days, was orders of magnitude less complex than current distributions. I picked up a cheap bargain UNIX book, which was enough to get started.
Even at the point you had installed it , you would be compiling binaries with GCC that would have targetted Linux/glibc etc so you wouldn't have been able to share many of your creations
Well, sharing my creations with the world wasn't very much possible anyway, since we had no internet connection. Besides that, for me the magic was in creating a program.
Besides that, your comment is factually incorrect, since a DOS port of gcc was fairly quickly available (DJGPP). In fact, IIRC Id Software's Quake was later compiled with it.
I'm not sure what the best compromise between having a "trusted" source of software is and being able to install what you want.
Me neither. I see how it is beneficial for some family members and friends to have a controlled software ecosystem. Also, App stores improved usability a lot.
On the other hand, if kids only get their hands on devices that are controlled completely by corporations, how will the next generation of hackers learn?
I imagine virtual machines, both cloud and local will become a commodity at that point so whilst they may not be taking their iPad apart or replacing the software it could potentially provide a dumb terminal to an infrastructure of disposable Linux instances all loaded with state of the art FOSS.
I can see them doing things like building mashups of their social data and possibly using the next generation of arduino like devices to create real world interfaces.
They will still "hack" just their building blocks will be different. Hell in the 70s you probably weren't a real hacker if you weren't a whizz with a soldering iron, how many of the RoR type hackers today practice that?
Even my first DOS PC had QBasic pre installed but it had no ability to make .EXE files which was what you needed to be able to do if you wanted to submit your software to shareware libraries.
It seems at that point that Microsoft wanted a devide between "toy" programming languages like QBASIC and "professional" ones like Visual Basic which cost money.
If you wanted to create "proper" windows software you needed to fork out some cash. Contrast that with now where you can download Visual Studio Express along with all documentation, compilers etc for free as well as a whole load of open source languages and libraries.
I now make my living as a programmer and I use almost no commercial tools at all, I doubt many people were doing such a thing in ~1993
Inflation is such an insidious way to pick the pockets of the working class. I wish the government would tax cash and equivalents instead of inflating the currency.
Have a look at Codea (http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/) for an example of such a tool.
(Disclaimer: I know the guy who wrote it, but i genuinely believe its a very cool environment for learning programming and writing basic games)
No. But for a large proportion of the PC Market this doesn't apply. They only ever used their PC for email, youtube, email etc. So for what is probably a majority of PC users (ie. Not you, me or most HN readers) this is 'Tablet vs Computer'.
To call the argument 'dumb' is dumb. Make your point without attempting to dismiss the argument in such a cheap manner.
Artists use wacom pads and cintiqs to "create" audio experts use mixing boards and MIDI instruments, 3d artists use even more specialized tools (this is my proffession so I happen to know more about it than the others) a lot of what is happening with tablet computers is that the keyboard/mouse combination, once a first class input device used by coders and office employees is becoming a peripheral just like all the others I have been talking about.
Creators who need to consume and to create will of course prefer to have a desktop, a laptop on top of a tablet. And there may not be much evolution on the desktop or laptop side because there is no such need to be: the desktop environment has had dozens of year to evolve, its concepts are solid for its intended usages.
But, something could fit that description while being more similar to a tablet. I think that's the point Atwood is making.
There are ways in which tablets have massive creative potential. The interface for instance allows a very direct interaction for some mediums and when you look at something like Garageband it has a very shallow learning curve (and price point) which will potentially pull a lot of people in who would have never have looked at that sort of thing on a desktop or laptop.
I think it's important to differentiate between the things that allows developers to be creative and the things that allow others to be so.
To say I'm on the side of the creator and am anti-tablets is to subscribe to a very fixed and narrow definition of what enables creativity.
The issue is; lots of people who never should have had desktops had to get them because there was no other option. It's not that the Desktop market will die or go away, it's simply that it will contract to what it should have been all along: a very small home market and a large business one.
Regards the "no serviceable parts" issue, there is nothing stopping manufacturers from building systems that are more open in addition of course it may be the case that kids grow up without access to one of these. However that was probably also the case in the 80s for the most part, most of the kids I knew growing up didn't have a computer but they probably did have a SNES or Sega Genesis.
Of course what might happen is that all the geeks and hackers buy the "open" hardware and build cool things with it, once the general population sees these things then perhaps they want the open version too.
Free market economics dictate that competition will create innovation after all and there is only so much you can lock a platform down without stifling that.
I think part of the problem with people and computers is that most wouldn't even bother to read a manual no matter what was included in it.
People expect it to be so intuitive that they don't even have to figure anything out. As though this highly complex machine was purpose built for their own expectations. How far would today's typical computer user have gotten on your VIC 20 if they put a diskette in the drive and nothing happened? The incantation that seems so simple doesn't just summon itself.
So there's an entire market for highly intuitive and trouble free systems that is now being catered to. But there are tradeoffs in building these systems. They're not as flexible and can't be used for all the things that a PC can be used for.
I just bought a tablet and have been trying to figure out a use for it that justifies the price. (laying in bed watching youtube doesn't cut it) It doesn't replace my PC, and it doesn't even replace my phone. I don't see it replacing anything. It actually does the opposite. Overall it increases the ubiquity of computing devices in people's lives.
If you wanted to start the computer up you pressed the button on the keyboard and it was booted and ready in under a second, ditto for switching it off (no hibernate/shutdown/suspend etc).
If you wanted to run a program , you put the floppy disk in the drive and typed "RUN" then pressed enter.
I literally learnt to use one at age 6 without much trouble, so did my school peers. Even our aged school teachers could operate them.
They were pretty much impossible to screw up since the entire OS was loaded onto a ROM chip so no viruses ,config files etc.
Even BASIC was very easy to use, the shell and the basic interpreter were the same thing. I don't think there were many people who didn't know how to do:
10 PRINT "SCHOOL SUXXX"
20 GOTO 10
They were also very extensible machines, you could add joysticks, mice, modems and it even had an analog output board you could plug into the back and control robots arduino style (we were doing this at age 8!)
The idea of being "computer literate" didn't really spring up until Windows 95 (or maybe 3.1) and people suddenly had to worry about C drives and "programs" etc.
I remember moving from programming text games in basic on my BBC into trying to understand OOP and Visual Basic for Windows and thinking "why does everything have to be so complicated?". To be honest I think if I hadn't had that taste of magic from the BBC I wouldn't have had the will to carry on learning to program.
The Microsoft Fortran compilers we were using on, I think, 386's, would allocate all memory at compile time and therefore the more memory requested, the larger the executable. I discovered that this lead to serious issues on the 5.25in disks and I was better off writing Basic on my C64 for that task.......
1. Handles for those that don't know, were, to use the C idiom, double pointers eg char, or Window. The entire MacOS API was based around them, because it allowed the memory manager to compact memory without having to tell you - it would change the value of the pointer to the memory, but as you only had a pointer to the first pointer, you wouldn't even notice the change.
I'm concerned the very reason tablets will take over the PC market will also mean that tomorrow's kids' experience is very different from, and I would argue poorer than, my experience when I got my first computer
I don't think that's any more an issue than today's car owner's have a poor experience because they don't have to worry about setting the fuel/air mixture in their carburetors like I had to with my first car. I think you are right that the closed environment is a barrier, but I live in one of the poorest cities in MA, and yet there are no shortage of computers on the curb on trash day that can happily run Linux/NetBSD/etc.
The young hacker culture will live on.
Ironically, my VIC 20 also was very user friendly. You turn it on, it's on. You put in a diskette -- well, it didn't load automatically but making it load was a very simple incantation,
"Simple" to who? You and me? Sure. Random guy on the street? Doubtful.
Sorry, I didn't express myself very clearly. By "poor experience" I wasn't referring to usability but to the lack of opportunities to tinker with the system and make it do things outside of what its creators intended.
"Simple" to who? You and me? Sure. Random guy on the street? Doubtful.
Surely the iPad is easier to use than the VIC-20. Then again, the VIC-20 came with a manual and it wasn't very long. I'm confident every VIC-20 owner read it and even the dumbest of us didn't have much trouble figuring out what command to type to load the disk.
Come think of it, I guess I was confusing things: I only had a disk drive later with the Commodore 64, games for the VIC-20 came on a cartridge so no typing required at all, just plug it in and turn on the power.
My dad tells me stories about how he and his father used to service the family car, replace parts etc. My father and I used to do the same thing with the family computer.
I hope my future son and I get to play with the family 3d printer.
I found this (recent) article in the NYT interesting:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/automobiles/as-cars-are-ke...
Little details like this are what start to make a big difference:
"“The California Air Resources Board and the E.P.A. have been very focused on making sure that catalytic converters perform within 96 percent of their original capability at 100,000 miles,” said Jagadish Sorab, technical leader for engine design at Ford Motor. “Because of this, we needed to reduce the amount of oil being used by the engine to reduce the oil reaching the catalysts.
“Fifteen years ago, piston rings would show perhaps 50 microns of wear over the useful life of a vehicle,” Mr. Sorab said, referring to the engine part responsible for sealing combustion in the cylinder. “Today, it is less than 10 microns. As a benchmark, a human hair is 200 microns thick."
What this model completely overlooks is that the digital immigrants built it, and the digital natives merely use it to watch videos on Youtube and poke each other on MySpace. Kids these are days are consumers, not producers.
And found the answer in automobiles. They are as essential to us as communication devices will be to everyone tomorrow. And yet only a few only know at least the fundamentals of an engine.
It's a problem society has to tacle by embracing STEM but it's not as problematic as it seems IMHO.
I agree with him that the updated display is the killer feature. But you have to give props to a high performance wireless network architecture too.
That being said, two tablets with identical specs, I prefer an Android tablet and a more accessible ecosystem, the problem for Android right now is the R&D and supply chain investment competition. Ten manufacturers each investing 10 million in their tablet design is not nearly as efficient as one person investing 100 million in their tablet design.
I keep hoping Google will address that issue by providing hardware/manufacturing R&D but it isn't one of their core competencies. When I worked there folks would call me to get in introduction to the folks designing the next Android phone, I'd chuckle and explain they had to go talk to Motorola or HTC. Perhaps now with their Motorola acquisition they will be in a place to make that investment, time will tell.
The original Droid came out in Nov '09 and had a 265ppi screen (same as the new iPad). When I upgraded from my 1st gen iPhone to the Nexus One shortly after that and put the two side-by-side, I simply could not stop admiring how incredible the screen was.
Sorry, but it really was just simple economics and we would've gotten high-DPI displays regardless.
In a broader sense, there seems to be much more innovation in tablets and phones versus traditional PCs. Some of that was sparked by Apple, some of it, such as Droid's high-res screen, was created first by someone else. But where is the comparable innovation with the PC?
I've got a much bigger issue with this quote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors
Those are 22" desktop LCD screens with a resolution of 3840×2400. The T220 came out in 2001. At an original price of $18k they certainly cost an arm, a leg and half your firstborn. But there you are.
"""The slope of this graph is the whole story. The complicated general purpose computers are at the bottom, and the simpler specialized computers are at the top."""
This is a terrible graph. The Mac has always been a premium niche computer. 28 years ago computing was in its infancy and computers were expensive, unnetworked with limited benefit to the average household.
Compare this the iPad / iPod Touch and iPhone. These are main stream devices that achieved immediate traction. It is unrealistic to compare Mac sales with those of main stream devices.
You then have the desktop market as a whole. If you compare any single company or brand of desktop against iPad sales, desktop sales would look in trouble. However, if you compare desktop sales to tablet sales it is clear that tablets are still only in their infancy.
BUT TABLETS ARE SELLING FASTER THAN DESKTOPS!
I don't know if this true but it doesn't matter and it doesn't say much about the state of desktops. Everyone has a computer, the market is saturated. No one has a tablet. It makes sense that tablet sales would rocket.
Buying tablets also make a lot of sense for people who just consume content. The fact is though that the iPad isn't great for productivity. It is far better for consuming content. This is what most people do.
However if you want to program, edit images, write a novel, maintain spreadsheets, make movies etc a desktop / laptop is what you need.
The PC isn't dead and it isn't dying. It has reached a point where people only buy replacements. Now yes, some people may switch perminantly to a tablet. Thats fine. For the forseeable future though there will be a large market of business and consumers who require more than a tablet can provide.
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The article also touches on how great the new iPad screen is. I don't think its all that. I walked past the demo of 'the new iPad' twice before asking a sales guy to point to which one was 'the new iPad'. Yes, if you put the screen close to your face you see less pixelation on icons. For general web surfing though I saw no perceived difference. Hell, I don't really see any pixelation on my iPad2. Perhaps I am not holding it close enough to my face...
I once had a workmate in 1999 whose sentiment was similar to your post, just focusing on a different device. We got into an argument about whether the desktop PC market was over or not. He didn't really believe that laptops were really more than niche devices, they were too slow, displays were too small, that most people would use desktop PCs for decades to come. That you could never do more than surf the web on it, you couldn't hack serious code with it.
That tablets are for consumption only...really? Diagramming (e.g., OmniGraffle), vector graphic production, sketching, mixing and producing music, editing images, updating a spreadsheet...why not? Many are using tablets for production already. Every year someone says iPad can't do X, the next year someone releases something that does X and it actually doesn't suck.
I often use my iPad 2 in bed (~1 foot distance), the screen is really close and I can see the pixels. The new iPad is absolutely frigging amazing, I'll never look at my crappy DELL/HP monitors at work in a positive way again (yes, I can see the pixels!). Why have we been stuck at the same crappy 1920x1200 pixel resolution for at least 5 years now? Could it be that no one care about innovating in the PC market because they can't make any money? That a 10" iPad has a higher resolution than my 24" PC monitor is totally Post PC.
As for now if you look on 22 cm long screen with resolution 1280 pixels for width, and you keep screen in 0.5 m distance it means that one pixel have size of 1.17 minute, so some, and maybe even most of people aren't able to distinguish single pixels.
Some people are using tablets for work, some are doing the same on phones, but for many computers are much more comfortable. It is very personal thing, for me tablet is cool for playing in some addictive games like Cut the Rope or Where's my water? but I will kill anybody who will propose to change my computer which I'm using for development for any tablet. The same, after reading several books on tablet I much more like reading on Kindle, it hasn't this ugly glossy screen when I can see me instead of text ;-)
Nobody is significantly investing in desktop pc display technology right now as far as I know, not samsung or LG, it's very stagnate. That's the point, PC R&D seems as good as dead. It's a big shame, I would really love a decent display for my workstation.
When 300 dpi laser printers arrived, nobody looked back. You could almost imagine that your school reports were typeset. It looked so professional! (If only the writing had been professional...) With 300 dpi iPad's you can almost imagine you're reading a book. People who are visual will care about this. I can see the subpixel coloring on my 20" monitor. If I turn it off, my antialiased text still has blurry vertical lines. It drives me nuts!
Or maybe the best example (again, back in The Day) was when my friend got his 32-bit Nintendo. He demoed a game and I said, "meh, it doesn't really seem all that better." Then he brought out Super Mario 3 on the 8-bit Nintendo and wow, was it painful.
Gamecube?
Or code, test & deploy web apps from an iPad.
Or design & layout web pages on an iPad.
We live in a post-mainframe era even though mainframes are still alive an kicking. But a mainframe isn't required create, test and deploy PC software. Once PCs are no longer required to create, test and deploy code for mobile devices we'll be in a post-PC era - that is, once PCs are no longer a required part of the general purpose computing ecosystem.
Except now the "home PCs", and many "business PCs", will be replaced by tablets.
I do this sometimes. It's definitely possible, and, under certain circumstances, preferable to using a laptop. I like having both in my arsenal.
The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That's over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it's going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.
If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth – and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.
The fact that Steve jobs could see this coming from back in 1996 is incredible. Add to that, that Steve also knew all through the Tablet PC initiatives of the early 2000's that it was too soon, technology wasn't able to properly support the post-PC form factors yet, and that styluses were a loser proposition. Bill Gates also saw the same forces at play, but he responded in the early 2000's with a failed attempt to move the PC into the next era. I guess that's a natural reaction for the winner of the PC era -- to try and carry it on.
You can see the same forces at play in the audio industry. Audio has gone beyond the early DIY tinkerer days, through a period of standardization and ubiquity, through an era where big, complicated, elaborate machinery was a status display, to a time of maturity where convenience and design prevails and the technology fades into the background.
The problem with audio, is that it doesn't let us extrapolate to the future. What's next? I can see a period where feature-phones increase in capability to the point where they're like the 1st generation smartphones, but with networks that are 1000X more capable -- just in time for widespread adoption by the developing world.
Will the developing world leapfrog the developed world in much the same way that it skipped over the era of hardwired networks straight to mobile? Will they be coming to economic power just as the digital realm has obsoleted many forms of material wealth?
Atwood does not say "hey throw out your PCs". In fact, he opens by stating that PCs are already ubiquitous. This article examines the idea that major innovation is currently happening in the post PC area. He posits that the new iPad display is a killer feature.
This is a much more interesting talking point than "o noes but my Linux netbook is kewler".
"Post-pc" is just a talking point. The post-PC era will eliminate PCs like McDonalds eliminated kitchens.
Post PC means Jill Sixpack always has a net-connected device within arms reach. This is a big step closer to constant personal net connectivity.
It might seem like laptops are revolutionary, or were, but useful ones have been around for 20 years, and to what end? They've become progressively more useful in terms of screen quality and battery life, but they have consistently failed to produce any kind of revolution. And why should they? They're just a more expensive version of your desktop computer, that's small enough to carry around.
I'm happy to class this as useful, but the laptop's persistent insistence on being merely a small version of the desktop falls somewhat short of "revolutionary".
pads will constitute the renaining 90%. They are bringing a useful machine to the $500, $400... even $100 market. They, like cell phones did for cameras, are what will make the technology ubiquitous.
So, it's hard to say what is "more revolutionary". If you are more concerned with the invention of the basic concepts, the PC is. If you are more concerned with what were the last big changes required to unleash the technology in a ubiquitous way, pads are.
While I agree that the display improvements are noteworthy, I would say that tablets are not "by definition all display." The tactile interaction is as much a part of a tablet's worth.
[1]: Although not to the extent of that Microsoft demo posted a week or two ago.
If the Galaxy Nexus is really on par with the iPhone (and I'm highly skeptical of that) then I might stick with Android for my next phone, but otherwise I have to go iPhone just based on touch characteristics alone.
EDIT:
http://androidandme.com/2010/03/news/is-multitouch-broken-on...
Quality daytime viewing, via LiquiVista (or similar)[1]; electrostatic haptic feedback for something better than a goddamn vibration [2].
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6tzaIgZKs0 (LiquiVista) 2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiCqlYKRlAA (Senseg)
I see the iOS devices (iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad), as just the beginning. Apple has made astounding progress on these mobile devices where their competitors haven't really caught up to yet:
1) The display, amazingly higher-res than HDTVs now (2048-by-1536-pixel resolution at 264 pixels per inch (ppi))
2) Connectivity (Wifi/multiple carriers/LTE even)
3) Battery life to weight ratio (9hrs using cellular network, at 1.46lbs)*
4) Graphics/Processor punch (Dual A5X processor with quad-core graphics)
5) An ecosystem of applications that are on the whole, of good quality, and generate a lot of revenue (25 Billion apps sold [2])
When I say "just the beginning", I really mean that. And I don't mean that Apple will always be at the top, probably not by a long shot. What I want to ask, and I wonder why everyone else isn't asking is, what's next? Apple won't be at the tippy top forever, so won't the next generation of innovators please stand up?
[1] Anyone remember lugging around their 8+ lbs Dell laptop, that had a battery that lasted maybe 2 hours in 2005? I do. My back still hurts.
[2] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2012/03/05Apples-App-Store-D...
[1] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...
As a consumer, I worry about "buying" a closed, networked device and discovering that I don't really own it, but merely have a licence to use it under draconian terms of service. I don't want to "buy" a book or a movie or a piece of software, only to have it yanked off my device remotely.
Meanwhile, the government of my country (Canada) is rolling out a new copyright law that will make it a criminal offence to circumvent "digital locks", even if it's for legitimate, legal personal use.
However, I still hold out hope that as the technology matures, costs fall and competitors catch up to Apple's tight vertical integration, it becomes more feasible to run a full-featured open source device with a healthy ecosystem built around it.
Well, I'd have to say the OS's interface and overall UX is more important. Maybe not for some, but it's a big deal for me.
The thing is, most of my computer use is programming and writing. I need a keyboard, support for a term window, Emacs and IntelliJ, TeXShop, etc.
I might be able to earn a living using just an iPad by running a term app and doing development using a remote Linux server with SSH, Emacs, etc. and do writing using Pages, but that would be like running a race hopping on one foot.
I think that "iPad 5" might do it for me however: a larger physical screen size, about half the weight, and great IDE support for doing Lisp, Java, Clojure, etc. I'll wait 2 years and see. I think that this will require new paradigms in writing and programming tools. Mind is open.
My wife is not an advanced user of computers by any stretch of the imagination, but I would never buy an iPad for her.
She has a DSLR and 60k photos in iPhoto (~320G). iPads will eventually store this much in 3 years, but you will want it backed up somewhere (and in 3 years the "cloud" still won't be doing this much (personal) data at a reasonable personal cost compared to a physical device). And she will not be tolerant of doing edits or looking at photos on a 10" screen.
Not to mention that once you increase the screen size, portability goes out the window -- you will have a monitor. And guess what? Touch input doesn't really work ergonomically on a 24" monitor.
There are solutions, Airplay will obviously be involved, as will BT input devices. But it's not quite ready for prime-time yet.
For large monitors, AirPlay to the TV works great today. I can snap a picture on my iPhone, step inside my house and the next second, show the picture on a 50" TV to all my guests. Instantaneous. I don't have to connect to a computer at all. It even works for videos.
Combine that with a card from Eye-Fi and cloud storage, and I'd say that in two years tops, you'll feel like it's a completely normal and safe way to manipulate your pictures. Use the iPad to arrange them in collections. Show them on the TV. Store them online.
Most people here are actually producers when it comes to computers, so most people say things like "I still need to product (spreadsheet | programming | lolcat images)" and the pc will never go away. But I think this article was talking about your websurfing, facebook updating, web reading consumers.
Workstations killed mainframes, because you didn't need that stupid command line. You could point and click. But real software engineers would install UNIX tools, or SSH (or telnet) into a server, and take advantage of the pretty display for richer reports.
PCs killed workstations, because they were cheaper, and their OS was more user friendly. Unfortunately, "user friendly" meant "dumbed down". You could take advantage of innovations in IDEs, word processors, email programs, and web browser; but it was harder to instal UNIX tools. You could still SSH into a server (which would be a workstation, if you were on a tight budget) and get UNIX stuff done. You could also configure X, and do workstation stuff.
Now, tablets are killing PCs, because they are cheaper, more portable, and more "user friendly" (dumbed down). There's probably no way to install UNIX tools. But you can get a virtual server for peanuts (or set up a home PC), hook up a USB keyboard, and an SSH "app", and everything is fine. The display is a bit small, but many tablets these days can power a HD display (look at the Raspberry Pi, which uses mobile phone components). Apple may or may not include the right port, but Android tablets can. And you can take advantage of innovations in touch interfaces.
I would argue that it's more than they need, that a service like OnLive is before its time but not more than a few years from hitting prime. I would say get ready for the Post Hardware Era.
The 1GB/month limit most carriers provide is going to be nowhere near enough, you will need more like 1/2 TB per month and it needs to be provided reliably.
Here in Portugal, our main (wired) ISP has been putting Foneras[1] in every subscribers' home for a couple of years or so, which means that every subscriber they have can connect for free anywhere there's a home with their service. A couple of months ago they launched an iPhone app which can use their network of Wifi routers to make calls through them - they essentially became a mobile provider using Wifi.
I can see this approach taking place on a larger scale; not only related to connectivity, but to actual computing: imagine that each router was also a beefy server, particularly in terms of CPU and GPU capabilities; these would provide the computing needs for wireless devices connected to them.
Using existing ways of moving the "state" of an application between machines, you could have your wireless devices hopping from server to server as you moved around, without having a great impact on the rest of the network.
This would still mean hardware in each home, of course, but it'd be a black box hidden from sight and chosen, bought and managed by some company.
Let's compare my session here on HN with how it would be if I was streaming my web browser from somewhere else.
Currently I pull down a few KB of ascii every i load up a comment thread and then spend maybe 20-30 minutes reading it during which time no bandwidth is used.
If I was streaming this from a browser in the cloud, I would be pulling down an order of magnitude more data since scrolling down the page could easily be a few MB vs no data at all.
You could have hardware "basestations" as you suggest which would be an interesting idea. Of course locating these geographically would be a difficult task. You might end up with rural areas where it would be impossible to do any computing at all because no basestation was in range, or you would end up with urban areas where there would be massive demand.
You would also have to account for what happens if somebody decides to have a big party or event somewhere and suddenly the local basestation computer goes from only having to service 10 - 100 clients to suddenly having to service 1000+?
Rural would probably fallback to mobile networks and real datacenters, possibly with degraded service. Urban would just be adjusted based on trends - places with higher demand would get more powerful boxes; the same as scaling any other servers, really.
You would also have to account for what happens if somebody decides to have a big party or event somewhere and suddenly the local basestation computer goes from only having to service 10 - 100 clients to suddenly having to service 1000+?
Assuming a decent infrastructure, you'd only need to have enough wireless bandwidth; computing resources wouldn't necessarily have to be tied to local devices. So a party would just mean that more machines from the neighborhood would help via wired connections (I'm assuming basestations in the same neighborhood could speak to each other using local routers, without having to do a round trip to the ISP datacenter).
Of course, this still means that machines shouldn't be running at 100% capacity, but that's just common sense.
So what I could see happening is people at that point carrying around "personal compute servers" with them for just such an event, or at least having on in their home/office.
Also bear in mind that CPUs/GPUs appear to be getting pretty cheap as well as pretty small and you would need one anyway to do the video decompression so having something on your device capable of doing the basic UI etc isn't much of a stretch.
Perhaps you end up with 3 tiers of processing, i.e your device, your local node and "the cloud" (i.e a proper datacenter). The issue is making all of this transparent from a usability perspective.
That's what they said in the mid-90s as the web was catching on (remember the "network computer"?). And then came Flash and Java applets and Javascript and various other things and it turned out that a dumb web client had to be pretty smart to keep up with the web.
I try never to say that something is impossible, because I don't really know what the future will bring, and convincing myself that I do would be foolish. But I will have to be shown a lot more than what we've seen so far with OnLive before I'm convinced that the future of mobile devices is as dumb terminals.
We've come a long way since then and still have a ways to go before the dumb terminal model comes back... but I think it will happen. I think the problem for that model has been that the only people who have found a use for the power of a full size computer on a mobile device have been gamers, but I think this is probably because developers have never had the ability to build applications that use more than the mobile device's native hardware. OnLive needs to make a development platform on their service.
It's a great couch device, but it's too heavy to carry with you. I don't carry a murse, and I'd rather sling a Macbook Air than this for the extra functionality.
Minor things include it running too hot, and the flip cover leaving striated streaks on the display. In my opinion, iOS doesn't scale properly at this size - there is too much white space between the icons on the home screen, for example, and I would prefer to see widgets to show more information without having to open an app.
Ultimately, whether you're happy with the iPad is how much you buy into the Apple cloud versus the Google cloud.
In all truth, there is very little difference between the iPad 2 and the iPad HD. If you squint and peer very close to the screen you can see how high quality the screen is, but looking at the device from where it rests in your hands it's almost impossible to tell the difference.
Turns out the iPad does everything he and the wife want, which is mostly surfing the web, listening to iTunes[1] and getting pictures from their point-and-shoot camera to someplace safe. Remaining issue: printing the odd document. But you can get an AirPrint enabled smearjet for £35.
Our recommendation: Get the iPad now, see if it does everything you want. If it does, get another iPad for the wife instead of that Mac you'd share between you.
[1] Explaining iTunes Match made his eyes light up: "So I won't need to back it up[2] to an USB disk anymore? And I don't need to buy the 64 GB iPad to fit it all on?" (Hey, it's like someone designed this service for people like him).
[2] Most casual computer users seem to do this these days because they've already learnt the hard lesson of losing all their stuff once.
My 5 year old son spends 90% of his supervised 'computer time' on an iPad. He doesn't understand the concept of a pixel, or why it's good that we don't see them. He has an older iMac in his room, but still prefers using the iPad as his 'main computing device'.
Talk about burning a candle at both ends! The term 'desktop' is archaic when thinking about a computer as a tool. Designers and engineers on the forefront of technology are spending their time creating devices for the 'Post PC' generation... not creating a better 'desktop'.
Reading some of the comments here, I cannot help but picture the accountant who still keeps his numbers in a [paper] notebook. At least they still make pencils!
What's interesting about Jeff coming around is that he's a pretty hard-core Windows guy. It was funny to have Macs come up on the StackOverFlow podcast. Joel would recommend it for family, etc and you could hear it in Jeff's voice that he didn't see the need. We'll find out in 6 months if it's going to be a 3 horse race.
Now Jeff has a reason to learn C. Not to worry, ObjC on iOS is not your father's C. It's a lot more fun.
By that same token, are we truly in a post-PC era, or is it simply an era where tablet use is on the rise and PC use is on the fall? Nifty charts and screen resolutions aside, I don't see any evidence that we're past the age of the PC. My parents still haven't replaced their computer with an iPad. Neither have any of my old friends from school. I use my tablet for more and more, but I just still can't avoid using my laptop for certain things. And I most certainly don't have a tablet or phone hooked up to my television. And how many offices have you seen where all the PCs have been replaced by mobile devices?
In short, while I see things moving more towards tablets and mobile devices, I'll be convinced that we're in a post-PC era when I see it. Until then, it's all arbitrary speculation.
Well, we are definitely past the start of the post document-mail era. As for the rest, it's just a matter of implementation: is the advanced fabrication tech in your living room, across town, or across the ocean? So long as you get your product in a timely fashion, what's the difference? (Answer: manufacturing and supply-chain costs and how these impact profits and the consumer.)
Yes, but it's clearly just a matter of time. There's no infrastructure or technology we need to wait on. There's no document transmission function that email couldn't fulfill for more than 90% of the populace, no barriers to that becoming a norm.
Cars didn't cause 100% abandonment of horses instantaneously. Before the development of the largest trucks and most capable offroad vehicles, there were certain uses only draft animals could fulfill for quite awhile. Still I think the post horse-carriage era did begin with the first commercially sold cars.
Real world: many people and a business I know use HD resolution on Full HD displays (and 800x600 on 1280x1024 displays) just because letters are bigger.
I really hate current standard resolution: 1366x768. It fits 20 lines of code in Visual Studio. Even 10 years ago we had better monitors.
Citations, please?
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/12/printer-and-screen-... Printer and Screen Resolution (December 2006)
He recapitulates Tufte's argument that information density is curcial to speed of finding information and observes that stagnation in the improvement of screen resolution is holding us back.
Sounds more like a Windows problem then a pc problem. Since converting my family to Macs, I haven't had to handle any of this stuff but when they used Windows it was a monthly annoyance.
Also the first call I got from my Mum after buying her an iPad 2 was to ask how to increase the size of the Notes font (turns out it couldn't be done).
Popularity for technology comes in waves.
I think the (not-too-distant) future of home computing will have a lot in common with today's PCs. Articles like this one always seem to underestimate the amount of real creative or productive work people want to do -- something which is still a challenge on the iPads of today. Have YOU compared typing on a small screen to a big one?
With custom manufacturing becoming affordable, as traditional computers start dying, open source hardware will start replacing them. I think we are seeing the first steps in this direction with Raspberry PI, hobbyist open hardware people, 3D printing (in the future: cheap chip printing?), CryogenMod, etc.
I wonder if you will be able to use the open one to create stuff for the closed one?
More disturbingly, I wonder if the open ones will be allowed to have a fraction of the functionality. Hollywood would love to only allow Internet access from locked down devices, and if 98% of the population ends up on appliances, things like that actually become feasible to enforce.
This is already happening for me to an extent, I run a dual boot of Linux and Windows 7. Essentially Linux is my "programming workstation" and Windows 7 is my entertainment.
I would quite happily replace my Windows 7 boot with something more like iOS since the only applications I really use there are Steam and Netflix.
I'm actually quite glad that Linux does not support most of my games, since this keeps my productivity high.
The only irritation is when I want to watch something from netflix in the background whilst working on some code but even that is easily overcome by running netflix from a PS3 on my TV beside my computer.
Regards restricting internet access only to certain devices. At a government level that would be difficult legislation to pass.
I can see domestic ISPs only supporting specific devices perhaps to keep their support costs down, but I'm sure there will always be ways around this. I remember the guy who came around to install my first broadband connection insisting that I would not be able to access the internet at all from my Linux laptop until I showed him how I did it.
once the screen no longer requires a backlight, and can be readable any place a book can, computers will truly be ubiquitous. as for creation tools on these machines they are beginning to arrive now, and they will become more and more mature as time goes on. hopefully a less controlled ecosystem will win out but that much I dont know I can predict.
I've seen the screens, they look nice and crisp and clear and...I kind of don't care. Oh, the views on it are great, but it offers me nothing new.
Quite frankly, as product releases go, I question whether Steve would have let this out the door. It's a nice product, but insanely great? In comparison to prior developments, I don't think it meets that bar.
Now... a small and light PC that is completely intractable with via a touchscreen, wireless data, etc...
That's a goddamn miracle.
Bloggers just love to historicize the present.
The end of the PC era may be near but it's not because of 10inch hd screens.
> Really? Hi-def = no more pc?
My monitor is 2048 x 1152 23 inches.
20.05" × 11.28" (50.92cm × 28.64cm) = 102.16 PPI, 0.2486mm dot pitch, 10437 PPI²
At one foot away I still cannot see the individual dots.
There's been a 200 PPI option for over a decade now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_T220/T221_LCD_monitors
If the ipad3 has added expense or limited availability to get ppi above 100, it was a waste.
(I'm repeating hearsay, but it seems intuitively obvious to me - feel free to correct me.)
(Motorola Droid, Defy, etc.)
Might be related. It's "just" the same kind of matrix scaled to a three times larger display.
The new MBP with high-res display has around 130 PPI, significantly more than your display. The new iPad has twice that.
So now take a look at the page numbered 20 in this PDF:
http://www.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/books/bmotion.pdf
(starts with "and for each t > 0").
The difference between the MBP and the iPad is night and day. The italics, symbols, and math in the document render much more nicely on the iPad. Take a look at the parentheses and the script letters in particular. (I did this experiment.)
Incidentally, the T220 is no longer available new.
As for T221 - sure, we had technology 10 years ago, but that isn't really important - there's a quote in this article, that there are similar displays available today - but for thousands and thousands of dollars, not in device that costs $500. T221 was $18k when it was introduced - if there are no ~$500 displays with similar PPI, it might as well don't exist, since there will be maybe fifteen people in the world that will buy it, as opposed to 3 million people that bought new iPad during weekend.
However, by dubbing the tablet the "post-pc", its very definition still depends on the pc, being a definition ex negativo. Many of the arguments here are about whether the tablet can do everything a pc does.
The tablet does not revolutionise cultural artifacts or cultural goods, it merely allows for a consumption that is somewhat different from the consumption the pc offers. The consumed goods do not change, social media, media, art and science remain exactly the same, namely consumable goods.
The established dichotomy between the pc and the tablet is a fake one, used to artificially create demand that can then be met through new supplies.
The tablet does not change the mode of production, it is merely another facet of consumption, this time even more openly advertised as such by being advertised a "consumer device".
Calling it innovation is in my opinion a misrepresentation, because it basically reinvents the wheel once more, it undergoes the same syntheses and evolution as the pc did, just accelerated thanks to already available knowledge.
The tablet is a clever remix of technologies already available. It combines different modes of consumption previously divided, but it only changes the mode of reception, not production.
True innovation on the other hand has to change the modes of production first. The tablet cannot achieve anything other items cannot also do, and is thus not innovation or revolution, it is merely evolution, or even just another playing field added alongside others.
Film, recorded music, books and the radio changed the means of production, as did the pc. The walkman, the tablet and the tv may have changed the modes of reception, but nothing new can be created through them that wasn't already available beforehand and is merely refined, not substantially altered.
The "war" of tablets vs pc is just another sales pitch to make either more appealing to their individual audiences.
>> edit (for ease of understanding, an example)
As an example that is less abstract, take the "Hipster". Wearing clothing that is tattered might be "cool" to you and you wear it "ironically, as a statement". If you are poor however, you might have to wear tattered clothes because you lack the means to afford something else. Ironically or not, you are fundamentally still wearing tattered clothes. Irony does not influence the plane of action, but instead the plane of ideas, or in other words: ideology. It's the same in the debate of tablet vs pc: Whether you type a blog-post on your touchscreened tablet or with a keyboard on your pc doesn't change the underlying action, just the mode of action. Whether you prefer one over the other is ideology, the basic action remains unchanged.
>> end edit
Firstly: The iPad is a PC, a 'personal computer'
Secondly: The quotes refer to 'desktop computer' era being over (though one uses the term 'PC' in the context of 'PC wars'), so why not use 'desktop computer era is over' as the title?(more accurate though less shocking)
Thirdly: Through all this conflation, the author also tries to say that the 'general purpose computer' era is over. Personally, I believe there is a big future in 'general-purpose computer' tablets/phones/etc. (non 'desktop'), as well as in desktops and there is not a shred of evidence in the article which challenges this view...
EDIT: Spelling mistake
Do you think Jeff Atwood is less likely to have a decent point if Apple is paying him for his writing?