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Comment by Rinzler89 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of Microsoft's or Bill Gate's predictions turned out correct, they just weren't the ones to make those visions happen.

Gates said about 30 years ago that we'd all be having internet connected computers in our pocket in the future, and they were right they just turned out to be powered by Apple and Google and not by Windows. Same with tablet computers. Their own implementation failed but the tablet computer exists today and is pretty successful, except is not Win PC based but based on mobile platforms.

Same with AI, it will definitely happen in the near or distant future that consumers will be tied to AI assistants for work and life, same with full autonomous cars, but nobody knows yet who will be the one to win this battle, that's why tech giants are lighting piles of money on fire to make sure they'll be the ones on top of the rubble pile at the end of the AI war. This is the next gold rush.

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> Same with tablet computers. Their own implementation failed but the tablet computer exists today and is pretty successful, except is not Win PC based but based on mobile platforms.

We generally don't use them by _writing_ on them, though. Like, their predictive power more or less comes down to "computers will get smaller", here; if anything things like the iPad owe more to the 'Padd' things from Star Trek TNG than they do to Windows for Pen Computing.

On this basis we may surmise that Star Trek is better at predicting the future of computing than Microsoft, and, thus, rather than ever-present AI assistants, we will have evil AIs which can be made to explode with logic paradoxes.

>We generally don't use them by _writing_ on them

Writing and drawing on tablets is actually one of their major selling points in replacing computers and paper notebooks, versus just buying laptops with flippable touch screens which were the tablets of the past.

Most modern iPads do get written on them though, it's just not Windows based I guess. And iPad get more and more features to really write on them a lot.

Hrm, I'm actually curious about that. I've had three iPads over the last 14 years; I've never written on any of them. The feature didn't exist for the first two (the first iPad that could use a stylus came out five years after the first iPad, and even then it was only the niche Pro line for a few years), and I never got a stylus for the most recent one.

I've never actually _seen_ anyone use an iPad by writing on it; perhaps it's something that people only do in the privacy of their own homes.

>I've never actually _seen_ anyone use an iPad by writing on it

I go to a cafe in the university district where a lot of young students hang out and see many hand writing and drawing on their iPads.

Huh, maybe it's a demographic thing; as a certified Old Person, I just tap it or use a keyboard/trackpad case.

That's what I'm saying, it definitely is a demographic thing. Some people want their ipads to replace their paper notebooks to, not just their laptops.

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