“PCs are going to be like trucks”

Bluetooth and Intel's wireless display standard [1] are here already.

Support for these technologies in common devices is another matter...especially considering that wired devices are cheaper, don't suffer from RF congestion, and don't need their own power supply (at least in the case of keyboard and mouse).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Wireless_Display_(WiDi)

What is even more alarming is the quality of consumption has rapidly degraded. Lawrence of Arabia was photographed & designed to be watched in a pitch dark packed theatre with zero disturbance on a huge 72 feet by 52 feet imax screen. There is a whole generation that is consuming that same Lawrence of Arabia as a tiny youtube video on a tiny 9 inch by 8inch ipad, while simultaneously checking their twitter feed & sexting whilst sitting by themselves on a couch in a bright room. This to me is just SAD. Forget production, even the quality of consumption has been so grossly cheapened. These kids will NEVER know the grandeur of Lawrence of Arabia. It just makes you ask - what is the fucking price of progress ?

We are replacing one-way devices like TVs, books, and newspapers with devices that are inherently two-way like phones, tablets, and PCs. This is emphatically not heading towards a "consumption society." Kids are writing more than they ever have in the past, and though people bemoan the use of text-speak as though it's inferior, it's only people who don't understand language and that language is continually changing.

Our society is changing greatly, but it's towards more creation, more recording of creation, and more sharing with each other. Younger generations are going to create more of this culture, and us older and less flexible folks may not understand it, but there's no reason to think that kids are going to be all zoning out, particularly any more than they were in the TV generation. People who would never, never, have spent time writing in the past are now writing on their Facebook walls, not particularly well, but they're doing it. I'm incredibly excited for the future.

The proof of that? It is all around you: Your fridge will break into pieces within ten years, but the equivalent model from 40 years ago could run for another century. Your pair of denim jeans will be reaped to shred in about the same time frame, however there were originally designed as some very resistant piece of clothing.

The reasoning behind this quality degradation? My bet is on market predictability: You want to know what would be the time frame for a consumer to come back to the market as a buyer and outside fashion trend (which would mean not relying on "Extra Cash" that house hold have at their disposition in order to buy product that are not coming from need). Specially when the asked price is starting to be viewed as a share of your monthly/yearly income.

Consequence? I believe that we are more or less unconsciously moulded into wanting to consume more and more.

But I digress. Yes I do agree to a certain extend that we are viewed more as a consumer mass than a participating group of individuals, but at the same time we are in an information revolution (akin to the printing revolution). I would recommend to read "The Pirate's Dilema" from Matt Mason (published in the UK in 2008) which present some of the opportunities offered to consumer to turn into content creators.

The Surface Pro has a Core i5 Intel chip, half the battery life, a couple of fans, is heavier, thicker and gets hot. It has a powered USB 3.0 and can drive a 2560x1440p monitor and has a Micro-SD slot, a full Wacom digitizer and a pressure sensitive pen. Not to mention a full user navigable filesystem Even the latest iPad has none of these features (or disadvantages).

It is more like a convertible truck/car hybrid though and Microsoft still calls it a PC.

While we're definitely moving in that direction, the workflow he used is still impossible on a normal tablet for the time right now. Sketchbook Pro exists on the iPad, but as far as I can tell there's no tablet version that works with real digitizers. For now, it remains in "Work you need a real OS for" category.

You cannot easily use data from one program in another, no scripting etc. That severely limits certain types of work.

This applies particularly to Apple devices but also to many Android variants.

From the device manufacturer's standpoint, there are a lot of good reasons to do this:

* Enforce certain standards on applications for marketing reasons

* The official app store gets revenue for every purchase that every user makes

* They can control whether the user is able to upgrade the operating system, in particular they can force the user to eventually buy a new device to get OS upgrades

This sucks for developers. There are ideological reasons against this, particularly among open-source fans, but some of the practical reasons to hate this practice:

* You have to spend a lot of money for SDK's to write apps (particularly an obstacle for young developers, think of how expensive a three-digit cost [1] [2] felt when you were a middle- or high-school student)

* You have to spend even more money to post your app in the store

* You can't write certain kinds of apps

* There's no way to know for sure whether your app will be approved until you've actually developed it (and incurred all the time and monetary costs thereof)

* If you don't like the official store's policies, there's no alternative

* There's no way to change or experiment with the lower layers of the device (such as a custom operating system)

[1] If you use a currency other than the US dollar, please convert this number appropriately.

[2] I still remember how frustrated and angry I was, at the age of eleven, upon finding out that Microsoft MASM, the assembler used by one of my favorite programming textbooks, cost $180.