Apple iPad: Welcome to the New World of Computing!

“Personal computing — having a computer in your house (or your pocket) — as a whole is young. As we know it today, it’s less than a half-century old. It’s younger than TV, younger than radio, younger than cars and airplanes, younger than quite a few living people in fact,” Steven Frank, co-founder of Panic Software, blogs for stevenf.com.

“In that really incredibly short space of time we’ve gone from punchcards-and-printers to interactive terminals with command lines to window-and-mouse interfaces, each a paradigm shift unto themselves,” Frank writes. “A lot of thoughtful people, many of whom are bloggers, look at this history and say, ‘Look at this march of progress! Surely the desktop + windows + mouse interface can’t be the end of the road? What’s next?’”

Frank writes, “Then ‘next’ arrived and it was so unrecognizable to most of them (myself included) that we looked at it said, ‘What in the shit is this?’”

The Old World

In the Old World, computers are general purpose, do-it-all machines. They can do hundreds of thousands of different things, sometimes all at the same time. We buy them for pennies, load them up to the gills with whatever we feel like, and then we pay for it with instability, performance degradation, viruses, and steep learning curves. Old World computers can do pretty much anything, but carry the burden of 30 years of rapid, unplanned change. Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X based computers all fall into this category.

The New World

In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed, then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus scanners, their batteries last longer, and they rarely crash, but their users have lost a degree of freedom. New World computers have unprecedented ease of use, and benefit from decades of research into human-computer interaction. They are immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the 80% of the famous 80/20 rule.

Frank writes, “Apple is calling the iPad a ‘third category’ between phones and laptops. I am increasingly convinced that this is just to make it palatable to you while everything shifts to New World ideology over the next 10-20 years. Just like with floppy disks, the rest of the industry is quite content to let Apple be the ones to stick their necks out on this. It’s a gamble to be sure. But if Apple wins the gamble (so far it’s going well), they are going to be years and years ahead of their competition,” frank writes. “If Apple loses the gamble, well, they have no debt and are sitting on a Fort Knox-like pile of cash. It’s not going to sink them.”

The bet is roughly that the future of computing:
• has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
• completely hides the filesystem from the user
• favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility
• favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors
• lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and universally available web apps

“All in all, it sounds like a pretty feasible outcome, and really not a bad one at that,” Frank writes. “But we Old Worlders have to come to grips with the fact that a lot of things we are used to are going away.”

Frank writes, “The iPad as a particular device is not necessarily the future of computing. But as an ideology, I think it just might be. In hindsight, I think arguments over ‘why would I buy this if I already have a phone and a laptop?’ are going to seem as silly as ‘why would I buy an iPod if it has less space than a Nomad?’”

There’s much more in the full article - very highly recommended - here.

Source: MacDailyNews