Tethering to a PC/Mac is an obvious hack, but nevertheless today's tablets (whether iOS, Android, or whatever) are clearly post-PC devices. Why?
The filesystem has gone away.
Everything about the previous generation of computers revolved around files. To a user, everything on a PC is a file. Nothing on my iPad looks like a file. There are icons for applications. Are they files? Or is this HTML presented in a browser? Does a user know or care?
This simple difference changes everything. No files means that DVDs, floppy discs, thumb drives, and all other forms of storage are suddenly repositioned. iTunes sucks in so many ways, but one way it doesn't suck is that I don't care where my songs are, just that there's a database of songs with an interface that is song-specific. Music playing applications are post-PC ways to manipulate music.
Obviously iTunes exists on a Mac/PC as well as on an iOS device. On a Mac or a PC, it provides an interface for dealing with music files, but I can still hunt for the files if I want to. If I move a file, I break the carefully crafted illusion of there just being music.
On a Mac, I install software by downloading it and dragging it into my Applications folder. I'm manipulating files. Sure, there are fronts put up so I can avoid the files, like installer packages and the new Mac App Store. But the application files are still there to be manipulated and I can still fool around with the Library and stumble over the filesystem's spoor when I go trekking through the Finder.
On an iOS device, there are no files, there is no Finder. Software is installed by some magic process that never exposes me to the implementation. The illusion is complete. This is what makes an iOS device a post-PC device. I imagine that there are or will be tablets and phones where I can break into the device and discover that hidden from the user is a world of files. Such devices won't be post-PC devices, they'll be PCs in a tablet form factor.
To summarize, my contention is that "Post-PC Device" doesn't mean tablet or phone, it means "No filesystem."
1990's called, they want their technology back. [1]
It's been tried times and times again. I've seen it on Symbian on SE P910 (virtual directories per file sense, like video, audio etc), Windows 95 & later(`My Computer'), KDE, N900. You have seen it on other software, and probably will see a few more times.
The `no filesystem' is a leaky abstraction [2]; sooner or later programs start exposing files and directories, because that's what people understand and want to use. `No filesystem' is flimsy magic, files feel like physical objects you actually own. `No filesystem' is the limited menu of your DVD, files and directories are your house with rooms with drawers with shelves with boxes with items.
"No filesystem" is only a leaky abstraction when people rooted in the 1980s write filesystem software and try to wrap it in a filesystem-less interface.
Files and directories are what you--and people like you--like and want to use. The rest of us don't give a damn about them, especially the way you build them for us.
Now I will return to your snarky quip. Your contention is that if something failed in the 1990s, it will necessarily fail in 201x? This makes no sense to me whatsoever. Almost everything that succeeds today failed in some form in the past, it's just that times have changed and things previously impossible or impractical are suddenly reasonable.
The whole point of $500 thingummies is that they exist in a very different world than $2,500 whatchamacallits.
> Your contention is that if something failed in the 1990s, it will necessarily fail in 201x?
Nope; the reasoning for the inadequacy is based on the fact you can't please users by including just 80% of features.
Sure they use 80% at most, but everybody has different 80% [1].
A collection of objects (here: files) can only (reasonably) be a: 1) set, 2) directed acyclic graph - a.k.a. tree, 3) relational database (in the general sense)
1) is pretty much pointless,
2) is what my mom and little sister understand and use as it requires little querying,
3) requires a powerful query language (that's what right & comfy for us nerds, right?).
So far the filesystem-less software has been two-prong: mounting filesystems at certain pre-designated mountpoints (Windows & friends), nevermind that;
and presenting a querable database with a bunch of predefined queries -- AND NO WAY OF CREATING ANY MORE QUERIES.
That's the 80% your users aren't looking for.
Now if you come up with a query language that's quick and easy to use from GUI,
I'll buy you a week-long supply of your $FAV_BEWERAGE, cross my heart.
(drop me a line at dexen.devries + the usual gmail suffix).
But it will not `look like' -- semantics-wise -- as the curret breed of Symbians and iOSes.
QED.
Well, how I could I possibly argue with a guy who worked at Microsoft and by extension, with the argument that produced the design of Microsoft Word? Is that what you are selling me, a future where every tablet includes every feature of a PC right down to having a filesystem I can format? I don't want one. You go ahead, be my guest.
This argument attempts to bludgeon me with logic into believing that filesystems are somehow natural, when nearly forty years of hands on experience with computers tells me otherwise. They aren't natural for a guy like me, only a mathematician would suggest that a DAG is the right answer for storing all the world's information. Your argument falls into the Turing Tar Pit of embracing a single design where everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.
Now about my sister. Consider iTunes: She can type the name of a song and listen to it right away, that's my own Joel Spolsky quote. She can look at her albums. She can look at her artists. She can look at the songs she's purchased. She can look at the songs she has added to iTunes in the last few weeks.
If you want to call it a database, fine. If you want to call it a hierarchal filesystem, fine. If you want to call it a set, fine. I don't care what you call it under the covers, from my sister's POV, iTunes is NOTHING like looking at song files in the Finder.
My sister also likes her third generation iPod. She has never once complained that it doesn't have music files on it. If your sister wants a filesystem, I'm sure somebody makes music players with visible filesystems where she can be comfortable, and I'm ok with that.
Now I think I am going to go my own way and wish you much happiness as you go yours. If you would like something pretentious to ponder, here is my post on what's wrong with OOP:
I suggest to you--with absolutely no justification whatsoever--that organizing programs as towers of classes all inheriting from each other is isomorphic to organizing deeply nested hierarchies of files.
Another poster [1] in this thread made better argument than mine: it's not that non-hierachical file organization is bad. It's good (especially for small, homogenous data sets, I guess).
For other data sets it can be improved, and it will be: by adding support for somewhat hierarchical structure. They did it a few decades ago and it will happen again and again.
The example of music is very, very specific [2] -- all files come with diligently filled-in metadata, and all files have same metadata fields. Each song can be uniquely addressed by (artist, title, version) and mostly uniquely by some other tuples.
But that won't work very well for average Excel and Word files, at least not in the way they are created right now; they largely miss metadata or it differs from file to file.
MS Word? Creeping featurism, bullet-point engineering, yea. They painted themselves into a corner. They broke out of it with Ribbon UI. I like it :D
--
raganwald, I'm terribly sorry for being irritating in the above posts; I'll try to social up :-)
I don’t buy it. I haven’t touched any of my 4,822 audio files in the filesystem in years. They are in my music library and I couldn’t care less about where on my drive they are or how they are organized there. The same is true of all my photos. The abstraction works perfectly for me in those two cases, I’m missing nothing.
(My parents would be delighted if Word or Excel had a similar library of documents.)
The media library presents you the files pretty much as an OLAP cube. That's possible only due to metadata diligently assigned to music and photos (location, geotags and date and time). It makes much sense to filter by one or two attributes to pick the music for to-day. Try testing your media library with all the metadata removed...
Since the Word and Excel documents often have no such metadata, and the possible attributes are numberous, it's no wonder no `document library' got popular as of yet. The best you get -- the state of the art of desktop search -- is full-text-search with some semantic analysis, right?
My parents (the only, well, “casual” users I know really well) have all their documents in one folder with no hierarchy whatsoever, any sort of library would improve their experience. There is enough metadata to make it useful, I think. There is the time of creation, the time a document was last edited, its name – that’s more or less just as much metadata as I use for browsing my photos. (I don’t spend much time organizing my photos and my photo library is not very powerful – I cannot, for example, only display all photos taken with a certain shutter speed. Despite that I would really never want to go back to organizing my photos in the filesystem.)
A sort of document library could be just as good or better than the filesystem for managing documents, I don’t think that you have to end up with a leaky abstraction. (Browsing documents on Google Docs, for example, doesn’t feel wrong but you are not using a filesystem to access your documents, you are using a sort of library view.)
I think it’s kind of astonishing that no one has really tried to do just that. There are half-hearted attempts but one of the things about abstractions is that they have to be good to be successful. It’s certainly not easy but I think it’s possible.
> Post-PC Device : Build me a computer - No Local Filesystems Allowed.
I'm not sure I would agree with the post. It is difficult to argue with the success of the tablets, but I am not sure if diskless systems could really qualify as a ". Post-PC computing system" unless they replace the PCs.
Harddiskless computers have been around for quite a while now, but i'm not sure a standard workstation could be replaced by one anytime soon. Even though most data is stored remotely, local work copies are at the foundation of most of the tools we use.
These tools would have to be rewritten either to no longer make local copies or to hide their locality from the user. Both of the solutions are nontrivial and their benefits are non-obvious.
What is the exact gain of doing a checkout to a remote disk instead of that of my workstation? That i can ligitimately slack off at the coffee machine when the network goes down?
But maybe it is just that im not open-minded enough to allow my PC to need anything other than power for me to be productive.
Someday the iPad developers will realize that users want to access their content from several different applications in a compatible, centrally accessible manner. They will want to combine a picture from Hipstamatic with a song from iTunes with a thank you letter they wrote in some editor, combine them into a greeting card and then send it via email.
In order to orchestrate this, they will need a central repository of their data, that they can search around, and is hopefully organized (ie, they remember that their picture was taken in 1997 at that trip to Chicago, or that the song was a rock song they heard on the radio in highschool).
Apple, recognizing this need, will release a new app that will allow users to create hierarchical categories for their stuff, search their stuff, move it around, and make copies of their stuff. The app will probably be named "Finder", and these pieces of data might be named, "files".
What makes you think that a hierarchy is the right way to represent shared data? I don't use a hierarchy to organize my documents, I use search. The problem with a hierarchy is that it appeals to ontologists, people who like to organize things in one and exactly one way, and they like to do it up front.
Search, and its cousin Query, are the other way of looking at things: Put everything somewhere and give me a way to get what I want. I predict that if and when Apple provides something along the lines of shared data, it will look more like Microsoft's original vision for WinFS than the Finder.
Or maybe... just maybe... it will look like Newton's soup ;-)
Hear, hear.
Since forever, I've used my ~ folder as pretty much my whole document base, and use search tools to sift through the contents.
I add simply ontology when specific tools require their own unpolluted namespace (ie, pine/mail) or need to be installed for multiple users (local box binaries).
iOS devices (as an example) just take this to the next level. In fact, I don't even use the main screen for launching many apps, I just type in the search screen to get it. If I could speak it in a seamless way, I'd do that instead.
'Apple, recognizing this need, will release a new app that will allow users to create hierarchical categories for their stuff, search their stuff, move it around, and make copies of their stuff. The app will probably be named "Finder", and these pieces of data might be named, "files".'
They will be heralded for their visionary move; "game changing", some will say.
Meanwhile, Android fans will wonder why they didn't already have the equivalent of a shared "find resource" Intent.
In order to clarify, I assume when you say "no filesystem", you mean "no user-visible filesystem, but is still muggle-usable (and might well have a filesystem under the hood)", yes? Because we've had computers without filesystems for about as long as we've had computers. Computers with filesystems are a significantly more recent innovation.
Yes, iOS uses a filesystem under the hood. The applications just never expose it to the user. As an application developer you should be aware of it, but as a user? it doesn't matter one bit.
A computer without a filesystem that predated personal computers can be called a pre-PC device if you like ;-)
If a device has a filesystem for its own use but does not expose the filesystem to users or to applications, that's a post-PC device. If we merely denude the device of the Finder but all the apps use the filesystem, I'm on the fence. It's a post-PC device in all the ways that matter to users, but it feels transitional to me. Future generations of post-PC device won't expose a filesystem to developers or users.
So yes, iOS devices are post-PC devices, but they can become even more so.
It's only half a joke. The great PC revolution was that users became their own data processing departments. So pre-PC devices had users that were blind to the question of which Mag tape or removable hard drive platter held the data they needed for a report. PCs put us all to work as data processing minions, just as rotary dial telephones put us all to work as operators.
So if you turn your head sideways and squint, there are some similarities between pre-PC and post-PC devices.
The concept of "files" were an abstraction in the first place. The icon, or the row in my directory list output that says "/Documents/file.xml" is simply an abstract way of visualizing "where" and "what" that particular data represents.
What is different (compared to personal computers) is the filesystem (the location of your data) itself is becoming abstract and disjointed from the physical device you are using. Data is moving into the cloud and our devices become stateless interfaces. It's simply an undoing of what the personal computer did which was to tie your data to the physical device.
Agreed. The file system is hidden away as an unnecessary distraction from the user's view of the task at hand. The iOS devices are arguably more task-oriented than PCs.
Also in calling them post-PC devices Jobs is signalling his intent to continue moving in a new direction, one that separates them from the pack. Contrary to the article, Jobs did not claim that tablets are post-PC, just that his iOS devices were post-PC.
>"'Post-PC Device' doesn't mean tablet or phone, it means 'No filesystem.'"
"No user accessible file system" is probably a more appropriate meaning in terms of Apple (other vendors may vary). Another way of describing the Apple model is that the user cannot access the file system without Apple's explicit permission (e.g. iTunes and MobileMe mentioned elsewhere).
What is "backing them up?" Why am I doing this? What purpose does it serve? It sounds like something that people with pocket protectors care about... They like the arcana of playing with PCs whereas I like music.
In all seriousness, if losing all your music when you lose your tablet is a fatal flaw, the solution is to expand MobileMe so that it syncs my music to the cloud, not to ask me to know what FAT32 is and why some hard drives can hold a 1080p movie but others can't even if they claim to have enough disc space and...
Oh, my head hurts just trying to describe the awful experience that is using a PC.
If someone's too air-headed to understand the utility of backups, why would they pay $100/yr to do it?
And that $100 would only get you 20GB, so you'd be limited to a total of around 2.5 of those 1080p movies you're apparently throwing around (assuming a conservative 8GB each). And it'd take approximately a million years to sync them on any typical home broadband connection. And you'd better not be doing that over 3G, oh boy.
No, moving to THE CLOUD just gives you a different set of problems.
Let's have a little empathy for people like me who aren't so technical, please. "Backup" is jargon for one particularly brittle and error-prone way to solve the problem of "What happens to my music when I drop my tablet into a vat of acid?"
It's no surprise that people don't understand its utility. Quite honestly, it seems like most companies don't implement backups particularly effectively. If "professionals" can't get it right, how does giving someone a filesystem solve the problem?
My suggestion to you is to think about how a post-PC device should solve the disaster-recovery problem in a way that appeals to postPC users. If you can invent something that a luddite like me would use, you have a YCombinator startup right there.
Think about DropBox as an example. It's a folder. And it syncs. DropBox is right on the edge of PC/Post-PC. It still works with files, but all of the moving parts are out of sight.
So go out and invent the post-PC disaster-recovery mechanism. Make it like DropBox, not like backing up music. Just don't try to drag people backwards to being sysadmins. That's not going to work.
Someone needs to make a much cheaper and more user-friendly Drobo-style solution, perhaps with compatible cables for iPads, iPhones, etc.
You plug your device in, it synchs, and then you're free to fling it out the window. No monthly fees to keep up with, and if done well, it's basically a one-time $100 back-up investment. Make it work easily with OS X and Windows, and people like my parents would never have to worry about the dog eating their laptop again.
So far, there are rumours suggesting that Apple will implement music syncing via MobileMe, but right now it only syncs "productivity" data like contacts, bookmarks, and email accounts.
I tell Time Machine to back up. It will do just that for me, I don’t need to know where the actual music files are for that. This is really no problem. (This is from the perspective of a casual users.)
Which is why the OS (Win7, iOS, OSX at least) reminds you to back up the system and makes it easy to do so (ie, attach drive with sufficient space, go).
iOS requires iTunes on a PC/Mac to back up, but this is likely a business decision to make more $$, and could easily be replaced by a clouded or local backup appliance.
In this mechanism you have to willingly ignore the backup requests... it's like the seatbelt beep in modern cars - at that point, it's 99% PEBKAC if no backup exists.
I'm not sure I understand the need to organize new innovations into "generations". I see the current tablet offerings as a solution to a different problem than the one PCs currently solve.
The idea that tablets are "post-pc" seems far too limiting, and I think it reflects the current trend in consumer electronics to race for some lowest-common-denominator-does-it-all-general-purpose device, rather than understanding that different needs can sometimes be better solved with different devices.
Steve Jobs uses "post-PC" to drive a brand wedge between the previously dominant Microsoft Windows/X86 platform - the PC, and IOS/ARM - the iPhone & iPad. He wants customers to regard the "PC" as old-fashioned, behind the times, and unable to catch-up. Post-PC is a brilliant marketing slogan that fully illustrates the positioning of the Apple mobile platform brand.
Microsoft and Intel are indeed faced with the innovators dilemma. Both are fully constrained by their legacy product lines, which respectively define their brands. Intel went so far as to sell off its ARM CPU business to Marvell in 2006. Intel's Atom, even if eventually energy competitive with ARM, will face commodity pricing rather than monopoly pricing. Likewise Microsoft already has ARM-compatible Windows CE and Windows Mobile. These do not run typical cash-cow Windows applications. In order to make the leap to the Post-PC era, both Microsoft and Intel must leave their cash cows behind, or worse, participate in their decline.
We are at just the beginning of the Post-PC era, and I'm very excited about the multitude of sensors and potential actuators that can be coupled with, and enhance the usefulness of, smartphone and tablet devices. The GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, speaker, cameras, and NFC are just the starting point. Expected in a few years are barometric pressure, humidity, and temperature sensors. Most of these don't these make sense on a PC. Furthermore, smartphones and tablets will mesh with each other and with the increasingly intelligent devices encountered in our everyday environment.
The Post-PC era is additionally characterized by responsive cloud services that offset the limited hardware capabilities of ARM mobile devices. For example, Google is rolling out a real time speech translation app that simply wraps up the microphone input, translates it at a server farm, then immediately sends the translated speech waveforms to the speaker output. Your Post-PC device can hear and talk. Likewise, imagine what happens when the video camera output is processed by a powerful cloud server - we have product and facial recognition, and beyond that I expect general vision capabilities to arise.
I don't buy the taxonomy, I don't buy the evolutionary relationship. Is a screw driver a post-hammer device?
People have a relationship with data, they refine it, they explore it, they correlate it, they hoard it, they spend it to get more data.
Computation, networks, and storage are the tools of data manipulation. Visualization via iPad, visualization via color plotter serves different versions of the same purpose.
As the cost of assembling a sufficiently rich network of computation, network and storage resources drops below the personal value of the data manipulation that the set of resources is capable of, an economic opportunity is created.
Look at network attached LCD 'picture frames' as a canonical example of this value equation playing out in the real world. In 1984 people took color slides printed on cellulose, put a 250W lamp behind them and projected them periodically on the wall. The cost of doing a 'picture frame' application with acceptable resolution was north of $250,000 (yes a quarter of a million dollars, I worked at the Image Processing Institute at USC and we had such a system in house for flipping through a variety of images in "true color" (24 bit RGB) and that is what it cost.) My Mom got a Kodak "easy share" picture frame in 2006 with better resolution and more storage for less than $250.
The constant here is a personal relationship with data (pictures) the variable here is that cost to instantiate that data such that it can be interacted with.
Post-PC implies a sequential relationship with PC. I claim that its a parallel economic relationship. An economic choice is made to view images with the picture frame rather than the slide projector or the laboratory image analysis setup (or the PC).
PC's have a low marginal cost for adding a new data manipulation capability, that gives them great value when new data is encountered. For established data they have a high unrecoverable cost (and on-going maintenance burden).
Tablets 'work' because they provide a data interaction service (surfing the web, reading, watching video, tracking your friends) at less economic cost than a laptop.
I would actually say that Microsoft's tunnel-vision on everything being a Windows powered "pc" is why they have always failed in the tablet market over the years.
A Post-PC Device is a Marketing Term used to refer to a iPad, and as far as apple are concerned, Only an iPad.
Personal implies choice, customization, and individuality, and these are precisely the things apple strives to remove from it's devices and services. The ability to choose one of seven particular colors and three price-range specific models is a laughable substitute.
The iPad is the first Computer which is post-Personal.
I actually believe that PCs are so == Computers for most of humanity that its perfectly fine to discuss post-PC devices
I personally think that a Post-PC device is simply a device that for some (and later many) people replaces a PC in their day-to-day computer-related tasks. So if whatever they used to do on a PC they now mostly do on say an iPad then an iPad would be a post-PC device.
While it's not fair to define a new generation of computing by its isolation and exclusion of the previous generation, people have been taking a pop at the iPad because a PC (or a Mac) is required before your iPad will work. At all. I'm pretty certain that the Apple II didn't need to be sync-ed up to a minicomputer via iTunes before you could turn the thing on.
The real reason is that Apple wants to nudge new iUsers towards providing a credit card when being forced to create a iTunes account for activating a iDevice, so that it can have it on file.
That's why the process to create an account without providing payment info is made intentionally difficult without jumping through hoops. It is as simple as that.
Post-PC means Wifi/OTA system updates work without tethering. Android, Nokia S60: check. iOS: fail. I have gone for months without an iOS update because my Mac was broken.
Also, I wish to get out of the music sysadmin business and will cut iTunes loose at the earliest opportunity.
>...allow a new population of non-expert users to use the product more cheaply and simply.
More cheaply? I would say you can get more powerful laptops/netbooks and desktops with more storage for less than $500.
There is so much hot air expended on essential meaningless PR terms such as this, especially when it comes to Apple.
All of this is just posturing for the media and general public and does not hold up to technical scrutiny more than the previous claim about the iPhone running the 'full OS X'.
I am more worried about the 30% tax on services that seems to tag along with the so called Post-PC devices.
> I would say you can get more powerful laptops/netbooks and desktops with more storage for less than $500.
Come on, don't compare crappy netbooks running windows 7 on a tiny screen to the iPad. The iPad is a completely different kind of device. While its specs might be (hypothetically speaking (for the sake of the argument)) crappier than some netbook out there, that's not the point.
You ignored the whole sentence and picked on "cheaply". You forgot "non-expert users" and "simply".
Also, coming back to the price. Think of the value the iPad is offering; not just the specs. Easy to hold, looks gorgeous, plenty of apps, fun to use, fluid experience .. etc.
If one part of a sentence is factually incorrect or an outright lie[1], it is entirely appropriate to point out that it is so, ignoring the other portions of it.
> crappy netbooks running windows 7 on a tiny screen
The iPad has a 9.7in screen, with a 1024 x 768 resolution. By comparison, many netbooks have 10.1in screens with 1024 x 600 resolutions. I wouldn't call that enough of a difference to say that netbook screens are tiny while iPad screens aren't.
> its specs might be (hypothetically speaking (for the sake of the argument)) crappier than some netbook out there
Your bias is showing, as is your ignorance of the current specs of iPads and netbooks. The first generation of iPads had specs which were inferior to many netbooks at the time, especially when considering RAM; the current generation (which isn't shipping yet) has comparably fast processors, but much less storage and probably less RAM.
But yes, Apple is trying to position themselves as not a part of the herd, removing the need to compete on specs. They are definitely succeeding[2], which allows them both to focus on the interface and appearance and to make their products into appliances, where it doesn't necessarily make sense to compare them to anything else. How do you compare UI, after all? If Apple is able to avoid objective measurements, that's a huge success for them, since they'll be able to sell hardware that's slower or older without anyone noticing.
[1] In this case, it is factually incorrect, and perhaps an outright lie, to claim that iPads are cheaper than netbooks. $379.99 for a netbook is less than $499 for an iPad.
[2] As your comment makes abundantly clear, Apple does not lack fans, nor will these fans stand quietly by while objectively true statements are made that disparage Apple.
I'm not a huge apple fan as you try to imply. I don't own an iPad, I don't even use Mac OS X (I use Ubuntu). But I find Apple's products appealing and I like their approach.
Your mentality is exactly why Google and Microsoft (and others) don't get Apple at all. You think in "data". If something can't be put in a spreadsheet, it's not real for you.
Your comparisons between netbooks and iPads are ridiculous. You're comparing the price, specs, and screen size. You just don't get it.
11" is tiny for windows 7, because it wasn't designed for netbooks. The taskbar takes a huge part of the screen, as do the title bars and menu bars and tool bars and tab bars.
The iPad screen size might be the same or smaller or whatever, but because applications are designed specifically for it, they use the screen space much more efficiently.
By the way, Apple has its own netbook. It's called Air and it has a 11" variant. It's much more expensive than typical netbooks though, and I guess you could argue that it's not really a netbook.
> Apple does not lack fans, nor will these fans stand quietly by while objectively true statements are made that disparage Apple.
Your sense of "objectivity" is ridiculous.
It's like your counting the number of character in a logical argument as a measure of its validity. "I wrote more characters than you, therefore I win the argument". This is just an analogy of course, and this is not what you're saying. But, you're using the wrong measure for determining the value of the iPad.
> If one part of a sentence is factually incorrect or an outright lie[1], it is entirely appropriate to point out that it is so, ignoring the other portions of it.
It's only a lie when you take it out of context. It's talking about non-expert users. Only geeks like us would shop around for the best laptop deals. Most people don't even know how to evaluate the specs. "What does dual core mean and why should I care? What type of memory is best?".
non-expert users cannot get a product that's cheaper than the iPad and provides the same or similar experience. There just isn't such a product.
Not to mention the iPad uses SSD instead of magnetic discs. A typical non-expert user wouldn't even know what SSD means and if he had to pick a laptop he would most likely choose one with a magnetic disk because it tends to be cheaper (it's not like he would read all the specs anyway).
Your post has nothing to do with the argument at hand. The article effectively claimed that the post-PC devices are "cheaper". I refuted that in my original post above.
Your argument that they are of more value because of the software is subjective, not objective and the parent post acknowledged that. And no one is talking about 11" netbooks here which you introduced as a strawman to beat down PCs. There are a lot of 15" and 14" LAPTOPS (not netbooks, geez, are you stuck in 2008?) that can be obtained below $500(the Air is much more expensive).
At this point, the subjective comparison is between a $500 basic 10" iPad vs. a 14" or 15" laptop for $500 or cheaper and your claim is the iPad beats the laptop in value for the general public which is a highly debatable claim given the iPads lack of physical keyboard and small screen.
Remember, the iPad uses a 10" LCD(though IPS) vs. a 15.6" (a huge % increase in area).
The problem is that you can't really compare on specs. The problem I had with the article was that it compared it to the evolution from Mainframes to Minicomputers to PCs. Each step there, the cost was an order or more of magnitude cheaper(correct me if I am wrong).
When you can get "PCs" (a cheap crappy netbook is still a PC) for $280, the comparison falls apart completely.
Eg. You can get more than decent desktops for less than $500.
See:
Vostro 230s
Also Includes Intel Core 2 Duo 2.93GHz Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit 2GB 500GB 21.5" Monitor DVD ROM $499.00
My problem was the premise of the article, not about the supposed "value" of the iPad.
This is an article about past paradigm shifts and their properties in general, not about whether or not tablets are actually another such paradigm shift, isn’t it?
Comments
Tethering to a PC/Mac is an obvious hack, but nevertheless today's tablets (whether iOS, Android, or whatever) are clearly post-PC devices. Why?
The filesystem has gone away.
Everything about the previous generation of computers revolved around files. To a user, everything on a PC is a file. Nothing on my iPad looks like a file. There are icons for applications. Are they files? Or is this HTML presented in a browser? Does a user know or care?
This simple difference changes everything. No files means that DVDs, floppy discs, thumb drives, and all other forms of storage are suddenly repositioned. iTunes sucks in so many ways, but one way it doesn't suck is that I don't care where my songs are, just that there's a database of songs with an interface that is song-specific. Music playing applications are post-PC ways to manipulate music.
Obviously iTunes exists on a Mac/PC as well as on an iOS device. On a Mac or a PC, it provides an interface for dealing with music files, but I can still hunt for the files if I want to. If I move a file, I break the carefully crafted illusion of there just being music.
On a Mac, I install software by downloading it and dragging it into my Applications folder. I'm manipulating files. Sure, there are fronts put up so I can avoid the files, like installer packages and the new Mac App Store. But the application files are still there to be manipulated and I can still fool around with the Library and stumble over the filesystem's spoor when I go trekking through the Finder.
On an iOS device, there are no files, there is no Finder. Software is installed by some magic process that never exposes me to the implementation. The illusion is complete. This is what makes an iOS device a post-PC device. I imagine that there are or will be tablets and phones where I can break into the device and discover that hidden from the user is a world of files. Such devices won't be post-PC devices, they'll be PCs in a tablet form factor.
To summarize, my contention is that "Post-PC Device" doesn't mean tablet or phone, it means "No filesystem."
1990's called, they want their technology back. [1]
It's been tried times and times again. I've seen it on Symbian on SE P910 (virtual directories per file sense, like video, audio etc), Windows 95 & later(`My Computer'), KDE, N900. You have seen it on other software, and probably will see a few more times.
The `no filesystem' is a leaky abstraction [2]; sooner or later programs start exposing files and directories, because that's what people understand and want to use. `No filesystem' is flimsy magic, files feel like physical objects you actually own. `No filesystem' is the limited menu of your DVD, files and directories are your house with rooms with drawers with shelves with boxes with items.
Your way.
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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian
[2] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LeakyAbstraction
"No filesystem" is only a leaky abstraction when people rooted in the 1980s write filesystem software and try to wrap it in a filesystem-less interface.
Files and directories are what you--and people like you--like and want to use. The rest of us don't give a damn about them, especially the way you build them for us.
Now I will return to your snarky quip. Your contention is that if something failed in the 1990s, it will necessarily fail in 201x? This makes no sense to me whatsoever. Almost everything that succeeds today failed in some form in the past, it's just that times have changed and things previously impossible or impractical are suddenly reasonable.
The whole point of $500 thingummies is that they exist in a very different world than $2,500 whatchamacallits.
> Your contention is that if something failed in the 1990s, it will necessarily fail in 201x?
Nope; the reasoning for the inadequacy is based on the fact you can't please users by including just 80% of features. Sure they use 80% at most, but everybody has different 80% [1].
A collection of objects (here: files) can only (reasonably) be a: 1) set, 2) directed acyclic graph - a.k.a. tree, 3) relational database (in the general sense)
1) is pretty much pointless,
2) is what my mom and little sister understand and use as it requires little querying,
3) requires a powerful query language (that's what right & comfy for us nerds, right?).
So far the filesystem-less software has been two-prong: mounting filesystems at certain pre-designated mountpoints (Windows & friends), nevermind that; and presenting a querable database with a bunch of predefined queries -- AND NO WAY OF CREATING ANY MORE QUERIES. That's the 80% your users aren't looking for.
Now if you come up with a query language that's quick and easy to use from GUI, I'll buy you a week-long supply of your $FAV_BEWERAGE, cross my heart. (drop me a line at dexen.devries + the usual gmail suffix).
But it will not `look like' -- semantics-wise -- as the curret breed of Symbians and iOSes. QED.
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[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/12/09.html
Well, how I could I possibly argue with a guy who worked at Microsoft and by extension, with the argument that produced the design of Microsoft Word? Is that what you are selling me, a future where every tablet includes every feature of a PC right down to having a filesystem I can format? I don't want one. You go ahead, be my guest.
This argument attempts to bludgeon me with logic into believing that filesystems are somehow natural, when nearly forty years of hands on experience with computers tells me otherwise. They aren't natural for a guy like me, only a mathematician would suggest that a DAG is the right answer for storing all the world's information. Your argument falls into the Turing Tar Pit of embracing a single design where everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.
Now about my sister. Consider iTunes: She can type the name of a song and listen to it right away, that's my own Joel Spolsky quote. She can look at her albums. She can look at her artists. She can look at the songs she's purchased. She can look at the songs she has added to iTunes in the last few weeks.
If you want to call it a database, fine. If you want to call it a hierarchal filesystem, fine. If you want to call it a set, fine. I don't care what you call it under the covers, from my sister's POV, iTunes is NOTHING like looking at song files in the Finder.
My sister also likes her third generation iPod. She has never once complained that it doesn't have music files on it. If your sister wants a filesystem, I'm sure somebody makes music players with visible filesystems where she can be comfortable, and I'm ok with that.
Now I think I am going to go my own way and wish you much happiness as you go yours. If you would like something pretentious to ponder, here is my post on what's wrong with OOP:
https://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2010/12/...
I suggest to you--with absolutely no justification whatsoever--that organizing programs as towers of classes all inheriting from each other is isomorphic to organizing deeply nested hierarchies of files.
Another poster [1] in this thread made better argument than mine: it's not that non-hierachical file organization is bad. It's good (especially for small, homogenous data sets, I guess).
For other data sets it can be improved, and it will be: by adding support for somewhat hierarchical structure. They did it a few decades ago and it will happen again and again.
The example of music is very, very specific [2] -- all files come with diligently filled-in metadata, and all files have same metadata fields. Each song can be uniquely addressed by (artist, title, version) and mostly uniquely by some other tuples.
But that won't work very well for average Excel and Word files, at least not in the way they are created right now; they largely miss metadata or it differs from file to file.
MS Word? Creeping featurism, bullet-point engineering, yea. They painted themselves into a corner. They broke out of it with Ribbon UI. I like it :D
--
raganwald, I'm terribly sorry for being irritating in the above posts; I'll try to social up :-)
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[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301548
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301942
I don’t buy it. I haven’t touched any of my 4,822 audio files in the filesystem in years. They are in my music library and I couldn’t care less about where on my drive they are or how they are organized there. The same is true of all my photos. The abstraction works perfectly for me in those two cases, I’m missing nothing.
(My parents would be delighted if Word or Excel had a similar library of documents.)
The media library presents you the files pretty much as an OLAP cube. That's possible only due to metadata diligently assigned to music and photos (location, geotags and date and time). It makes much sense to filter by one or two attributes to pick the music for to-day. Try testing your media library with all the metadata removed...
Since the Word and Excel documents often have no such metadata, and the possible attributes are numberous, it's no wonder no `document library' got popular as of yet. The best you get -- the state of the art of desktop search -- is full-text-search with some semantic analysis, right?
My parents (the only, well, “casual” users I know really well) have all their documents in one folder with no hierarchy whatsoever, any sort of library would improve their experience. There is enough metadata to make it useful, I think. There is the time of creation, the time a document was last edited, its name – that’s more or less just as much metadata as I use for browsing my photos. (I don’t spend much time organizing my photos and my photo library is not very powerful – I cannot, for example, only display all photos taken with a certain shutter speed. Despite that I would really never want to go back to organizing my photos in the filesystem.)
A sort of document library could be just as good or better than the filesystem for managing documents, I don’t think that you have to end up with a leaky abstraction. (Browsing documents on Google Docs, for example, doesn’t feel wrong but you are not using a filesystem to access your documents, you are using a sort of library view.)
I think it’s kind of astonishing that no one has really tried to do just that. There are half-hearted attempts but one of the things about abstractions is that they have to be good to be successful. It’s certainly not easy but I think it’s possible.
> Post-PC Device : Build me a computer - No Local Filesystems Allowed.
I'm not sure I would agree with the post. It is difficult to argue with the success of the tablets, but I am not sure if diskless systems could really qualify as a ". Post-PC computing system" unless they replace the PCs.
Harddiskless computers have been around for quite a while now, but i'm not sure a standard workstation could be replaced by one anytime soon. Even though most data is stored remotely, local work copies are at the foundation of most of the tools we use.
These tools would have to be rewritten either to no longer make local copies or to hide their locality from the user. Both of the solutions are nontrivial and their benefits are non-obvious.
What is the exact gain of doing a checkout to a remote disk instead of that of my workstation? That i can ligitimately slack off at the coffee machine when the network goes down?
But maybe it is just that im not open-minded enough to allow my PC to need anything other than power for me to be productive.
Someday the iPad developers will realize that users want to access their content from several different applications in a compatible, centrally accessible manner. They will want to combine a picture from Hipstamatic with a song from iTunes with a thank you letter they wrote in some editor, combine them into a greeting card and then send it via email.
In order to orchestrate this, they will need a central repository of their data, that they can search around, and is hopefully organized (ie, they remember that their picture was taken in 1997 at that trip to Chicago, or that the song was a rock song they heard on the radio in highschool).
Apple, recognizing this need, will release a new app that will allow users to create hierarchical categories for their stuff, search their stuff, move it around, and make copies of their stuff. The app will probably be named "Finder", and these pieces of data might be named, "files".
What makes you think that a hierarchy is the right way to represent shared data? I don't use a hierarchy to organize my documents, I use search. The problem with a hierarchy is that it appeals to ontologists, people who like to organize things in one and exactly one way, and they like to do it up front.
Search, and its cousin Query, are the other way of looking at things: Put everything somewhere and give me a way to get what I want. I predict that if and when Apple provides something along the lines of shared data, it will look more like Microsoft's original vision for WinFS than the Finder.
Or maybe... just maybe... it will look like Newton's soup ;-)
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/WinFS https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Soup_(Apple_N...
Hear, hear. Since forever, I've used my ~ folder as pretty much my whole document base, and use search tools to sift through the contents.
I add simply ontology when specific tools require their own unpolluted namespace (ie, pine/mail) or need to be installed for multiple users (local box binaries).
iOS devices (as an example) just take this to the next level. In fact, I don't even use the main screen for launching many apps, I just type in the search screen to get it. If I could speak it in a seamless way, I'd do that instead.
I never wrote that hierarchy is the only way to organize data. Search and tagging are very important, too.
But where did you get the idea that hierarchies are useless?
'Apple, recognizing this need, will release a new app that will allow users to create hierarchical categories for their stuff, search their stuff, move it around, and make copies of their stuff. The app will probably be named "Finder", and these pieces of data might be named, "files".'
They will be heralded for their visionary move; "game changing", some will say.
Meanwhile, Android fans will wonder why they didn't already have the equivalent of a shared "find resource" Intent.
Bickering will ensue.
In order to clarify, I assume when you say "no filesystem", you mean "no user-visible filesystem, but is still muggle-usable (and might well have a filesystem under the hood)", yes? Because we've had computers without filesystems for about as long as we've had computers. Computers with filesystems are a significantly more recent innovation.
Yes, iOS uses a filesystem under the hood. The applications just never expose it to the user. As an application developer you should be aware of it, but as a user? it doesn't matter one bit.
A computer without a filesystem that predated personal computers can be called a pre-PC device if you like ;-)
If a device has a filesystem for its own use but does not expose the filesystem to users or to applications, that's a post-PC device. If we merely denude the device of the Finder but all the apps use the filesystem, I'm on the fence. It's a post-PC device in all the ways that matter to users, but it feels transitional to me. Future generations of post-PC device won't expose a filesystem to developers or users.
So yes, iOS devices are post-PC devices, but they can become even more so.
A computer without a filesystem that predated personal computers can be called a pre-PC device if you like ;-)
I was pretty sure this was going to be part of the answer, but I laughed out loud when I saw it anyway. Thanks for clarifying your ideas. :)
It's only half a joke. The great PC revolution was that users became their own data processing departments. So pre-PC devices had users that were blind to the question of which Mag tape or removable hard drive platter held the data they needed for a report. PCs put us all to work as data processing minions, just as rotary dial telephones put us all to work as operators.
So if you turn your head sideways and squint, there are some similarities between pre-PC and post-PC devices.
The concept of "files" were an abstraction in the first place. The icon, or the row in my directory list output that says "/Documents/file.xml" is simply an abstract way of visualizing "where" and "what" that particular data represents.
What is different (compared to personal computers) is the filesystem (the location of your data) itself is becoming abstract and disjointed from the physical device you are using. Data is moving into the cloud and our devices become stateless interfaces. It's simply an undoing of what the personal computer did which was to tie your data to the physical device.
Thin-client with a new buzzword.
Agreed. The file system is hidden away as an unnecessary distraction from the user's view of the task at hand. The iOS devices are arguably more task-oriented than PCs.
Also in calling them post-PC devices Jobs is signalling his intent to continue moving in a new direction, one that separates them from the pack. Contrary to the article, Jobs did not claim that tablets are post-PC, just that his iOS devices were post-PC.
>"'Post-PC Device' doesn't mean tablet or phone, it means 'No filesystem.'"
"No user accessible file system" is probably a more appropriate meaning in terms of Apple (other vendors may vary). Another way of describing the Apple model is that the user cannot access the file system without Apple's explicit permission (e.g. iTunes and MobileMe mentioned elsewhere).
> one way it doesn't suck is that I don't care where my songs are
Until it's time to back them up, right?
What is "backing them up?" Why am I doing this? What purpose does it serve? It sounds like something that people with pocket protectors care about... They like the arcana of playing with PCs whereas I like music.
In all seriousness, if losing all your music when you lose your tablet is a fatal flaw, the solution is to expand MobileMe so that it syncs my music to the cloud, not to ask me to know what FAT32 is and why some hard drives can hold a 1080p movie but others can't even if they claim to have enough disc space and...
Oh, my head hurts just trying to describe the awful experience that is using a PC.
If someone's too air-headed to understand the utility of backups, why would they pay $100/yr to do it?
And that $100 would only get you 20GB, so you'd be limited to a total of around 2.5 of those 1080p movies you're apparently throwing around (assuming a conservative 8GB each). And it'd take approximately a million years to sync them on any typical home broadband connection. And you'd better not be doing that over 3G, oh boy.
No, moving to THE CLOUD just gives you a different set of problems.
Let's have a little empathy for people like me who aren't so technical, please. "Backup" is jargon for one particularly brittle and error-prone way to solve the problem of "What happens to my music when I drop my tablet into a vat of acid?"
It's no surprise that people don't understand its utility. Quite honestly, it seems like most companies don't implement backups particularly effectively. If "professionals" can't get it right, how does giving someone a filesystem solve the problem?
My suggestion to you is to think about how a post-PC device should solve the disaster-recovery problem in a way that appeals to postPC users. If you can invent something that a luddite like me would use, you have a YCombinator startup right there.
Think about DropBox as an example. It's a folder. And it syncs. DropBox is right on the edge of PC/Post-PC. It still works with files, but all of the moving parts are out of sight.
So go out and invent the post-PC disaster-recovery mechanism. Make it like DropBox, not like backing up music. Just don't try to drag people backwards to being sysadmins. That's not going to work.
Someone needs to make a much cheaper and more user-friendly Drobo-style solution, perhaps with compatible cables for iPads, iPhones, etc.
You plug your device in, it synchs, and then you're free to fling it out the window. No monthly fees to keep up with, and if done well, it's basically a one-time $100 back-up investment. Make it work easily with OS X and Windows, and people like my parents would never have to worry about the dog eating their laptop again.
> the solution is to expand MobileMe so that it syncs my music to the cloud
Is this something MobileMe is currently capable of, or are you saying that it's up to Apple to implement that solution?
So far, there are rumours suggesting that Apple will implement music syncing via MobileMe, but right now it only syncs "productivity" data like contacts, bookmarks, and email accounts.
I tell Time Machine to back up. It will do just that for me, I don’t need to know where the actual music files are for that. This is really no problem. (This is from the perspective of a casual users.)
Which is why the OS (Win7, iOS, OSX at least) reminds you to back up the system and makes it easy to do so (ie, attach drive with sufficient space, go).
iOS requires iTunes on a PC/Mac to back up, but this is likely a business decision to make more $$, and could easily be replaced by a clouded or local backup appliance.
In this mechanism you have to willingly ignore the backup requests... it's like the seatbelt beep in modern cars - at that point, it's 99% PEBKAC if no backup exists.
>To summarize, my contention is that "Post-PC Device" doesn't mean tablet or phone, it means "No filesystem."
It could mean "Locked down to need app approval and 30% cut of services" too.
I'm not sure I understand the need to organize new innovations into "generations". I see the current tablet offerings as a solution to a different problem than the one PCs currently solve.
The idea that tablets are "post-pc" seems far too limiting, and I think it reflects the current trend in consumer electronics to race for some lowest-common-denominator-does-it-all-general-purpose device, rather than understanding that different needs can sometimes be better solved with different devices.
Steve Jobs uses "post-PC" to drive a brand wedge between the previously dominant Microsoft Windows/X86 platform - the PC, and IOS/ARM - the iPhone & iPad. He wants customers to regard the "PC" as old-fashioned, behind the times, and unable to catch-up. Post-PC is a brilliant marketing slogan that fully illustrates the positioning of the Apple mobile platform brand.
Microsoft and Intel are indeed faced with the innovators dilemma. Both are fully constrained by their legacy product lines, which respectively define their brands. Intel went so far as to sell off its ARM CPU business to Marvell in 2006. Intel's Atom, even if eventually energy competitive with ARM, will face commodity pricing rather than monopoly pricing. Likewise Microsoft already has ARM-compatible Windows CE and Windows Mobile. These do not run typical cash-cow Windows applications. In order to make the leap to the Post-PC era, both Microsoft and Intel must leave their cash cows behind, or worse, participate in their decline.
We are at just the beginning of the Post-PC era, and I'm very excited about the multitude of sensors and potential actuators that can be coupled with, and enhance the usefulness of, smartphone and tablet devices. The GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, speaker, cameras, and NFC are just the starting point. Expected in a few years are barometric pressure, humidity, and temperature sensors. Most of these don't these make sense on a PC. Furthermore, smartphones and tablets will mesh with each other and with the increasingly intelligent devices encountered in our everyday environment.
The Post-PC era is additionally characterized by responsive cloud services that offset the limited hardware capabilities of ARM mobile devices. For example, Google is rolling out a real time speech translation app that simply wraps up the microphone input, translates it at a server farm, then immediately sends the translated speech waveforms to the speaker output. Your Post-PC device can hear and talk. Likewise, imagine what happens when the video camera output is processed by a powerful cloud server - we have product and facial recognition, and beyond that I expect general vision capabilities to arise.
"Post-PC device" is Newspeak for "Personal Digital Assistant."
I don't buy the taxonomy, I don't buy the evolutionary relationship. Is a screw driver a post-hammer device?
People have a relationship with data, they refine it, they explore it, they correlate it, they hoard it, they spend it to get more data.
Computation, networks, and storage are the tools of data manipulation. Visualization via iPad, visualization via color plotter serves different versions of the same purpose.
As the cost of assembling a sufficiently rich network of computation, network and storage resources drops below the personal value of the data manipulation that the set of resources is capable of, an economic opportunity is created.
Look at network attached LCD 'picture frames' as a canonical example of this value equation playing out in the real world. In 1984 people took color slides printed on cellulose, put a 250W lamp behind them and projected them periodically on the wall. The cost of doing a 'picture frame' application with acceptable resolution was north of $250,000 (yes a quarter of a million dollars, I worked at the Image Processing Institute at USC and we had such a system in house for flipping through a variety of images in "true color" (24 bit RGB) and that is what it cost.) My Mom got a Kodak "easy share" picture frame in 2006 with better resolution and more storage for less than $250.
The constant here is a personal relationship with data (pictures) the variable here is that cost to instantiate that data such that it can be interacted with.
Post-PC implies a sequential relationship with PC. I claim that its a parallel economic relationship. An economic choice is made to view images with the picture frame rather than the slide projector or the laboratory image analysis setup (or the PC).
PC's have a low marginal cost for adding a new data manipulation capability, that gives them great value when new data is encountered. For established data they have a high unrecoverable cost (and on-going maintenance burden).
Tablets 'work' because they provide a data interaction service (surfing the web, reading, watching video, tracking your friends) at less economic cost than a laptop.
I would actually say that Microsoft's tunnel-vision on everything being a Windows powered "pc" is why they have always failed in the tablet market over the years.
A Post-PC Device is a Marketing Term used to refer to a iPad, and as far as apple are concerned, Only an iPad.
Personal implies choice, customization, and individuality, and these are precisely the things apple strives to remove from it's devices and services. The ability to choose one of seven particular colors and three price-range specific models is a laughable substitute.
The iPad is the first Computer which is post-Personal.
I actually believe that PCs are so == Computers for most of humanity that its perfectly fine to discuss post-PC devices
I personally think that a Post-PC device is simply a device that for some (and later many) people replaces a PC in their day-to-day computer-related tasks. So if whatever they used to do on a PC they now mostly do on say an iPad then an iPad would be a post-PC device.
While it's not fair to define a new generation of computing by its isolation and exclusion of the previous generation, people have been taking a pop at the iPad because a PC (or a Mac) is required before your iPad will work. At all. I'm pretty certain that the Apple II didn't need to be sync-ed up to a minicomputer via iTunes before you could turn the thing on.
The real reason is that Apple wants to nudge new iUsers towards providing a credit card when being forced to create a iTunes account for activating a iDevice, so that it can have it on file.
That's why the process to create an account without providing payment info is made intentionally difficult without jumping through hoops. It is as simple as that.
Post-PC means Wifi/OTA system updates work without tethering. Android, Nokia S60: check. iOS: fail. I have gone for months without an iOS update because my Mac was broken.
Also, I wish to get out of the music sysadmin business and will cut iTunes loose at the earliest opportunity.
>...allow a new population of non-expert users to use the product more cheaply and simply.
More cheaply? I would say you can get more powerful laptops/netbooks and desktops with more storage for less than $500.
There is so much hot air expended on essential meaningless PR terms such as this, especially when it comes to Apple.
All of this is just posturing for the media and general public and does not hold up to technical scrutiny more than the previous claim about the iPhone running the 'full OS X'.
I am more worried about the 30% tax on services that seems to tag along with the so called Post-PC devices.
> I would say you can get more powerful laptops/netbooks and desktops with more storage for less than $500.
Come on, don't compare crappy netbooks running windows 7 on a tiny screen to the iPad. The iPad is a completely different kind of device. While its specs might be (hypothetically speaking (for the sake of the argument)) crappier than some netbook out there, that's not the point.
You ignored the whole sentence and picked on "cheaply". You forgot "non-expert users" and "simply".
Also, coming back to the price. Think of the value the iPad is offering; not just the specs. Easy to hold, looks gorgeous, plenty of apps, fun to use, fluid experience .. etc.
If one part of a sentence is factually incorrect or an outright lie[1], it is entirely appropriate to point out that it is so, ignoring the other portions of it.
> crappy netbooks running windows 7 on a tiny screen
The iPad has a 9.7in screen, with a 1024 x 768 resolution. By comparison, many netbooks have 10.1in screens with 1024 x 600 resolutions. I wouldn't call that enough of a difference to say that netbook screens are tiny while iPad screens aren't.
> its specs might be (hypothetically speaking (for the sake of the argument)) crappier than some netbook out there
Your bias is showing, as is your ignorance of the current specs of iPads and netbooks. The first generation of iPads had specs which were inferior to many netbooks at the time, especially when considering RAM; the current generation (which isn't shipping yet) has comparably fast processors, but much less storage and probably less RAM.
But yes, Apple is trying to position themselves as not a part of the herd, removing the need to compete on specs. They are definitely succeeding[2], which allows them both to focus on the interface and appearance and to make their products into appliances, where it doesn't necessarily make sense to compare them to anything else. How do you compare UI, after all? If Apple is able to avoid objective measurements, that's a huge success for them, since they'll be able to sell hardware that's slower or older without anyone noticing.
[1] In this case, it is factually incorrect, and perhaps an outright lie, to claim that iPads are cheaper than netbooks. $379.99 for a netbook is less than $499 for an iPad.
[2] As your comment makes abundantly clear, Apple does not lack fans, nor will these fans stand quietly by while objectively true statements are made that disparage Apple.
I'm not a huge apple fan as you try to imply. I don't own an iPad, I don't even use Mac OS X (I use Ubuntu). But I find Apple's products appealing and I like their approach.
Your mentality is exactly why Google and Microsoft (and others) don't get Apple at all. You think in "data". If something can't be put in a spreadsheet, it's not real for you.
Your comparisons between netbooks and iPads are ridiculous. You're comparing the price, specs, and screen size. You just don't get it.
11" is tiny for windows 7, because it wasn't designed for netbooks. The taskbar takes a huge part of the screen, as do the title bars and menu bars and tool bars and tab bars.
The iPad screen size might be the same or smaller or whatever, but because applications are designed specifically for it, they use the screen space much more efficiently.
By the way, Apple has its own netbook. It's called Air and it has a 11" variant. It's much more expensive than typical netbooks though, and I guess you could argue that it's not really a netbook.
> Apple does not lack fans, nor will these fans stand quietly by while objectively true statements are made that disparage Apple.
Your sense of "objectivity" is ridiculous.
It's like your counting the number of character in a logical argument as a measure of its validity. "I wrote more characters than you, therefore I win the argument". This is just an analogy of course, and this is not what you're saying. But, you're using the wrong measure for determining the value of the iPad.
> If one part of a sentence is factually incorrect or an outright lie[1], it is entirely appropriate to point out that it is so, ignoring the other portions of it.
It's only a lie when you take it out of context. It's talking about non-expert users. Only geeks like us would shop around for the best laptop deals. Most people don't even know how to evaluate the specs. "What does dual core mean and why should I care? What type of memory is best?".
non-expert users cannot get a product that's cheaper than the iPad and provides the same or similar experience. There just isn't such a product.
Not to mention the iPad uses SSD instead of magnetic discs. A typical non-expert user wouldn't even know what SSD means and if he had to pick a laptop he would most likely choose one with a magnetic disk because it tends to be cheaper (it's not like he would read all the specs anyway).
Your post has nothing to do with the argument at hand. The article effectively claimed that the post-PC devices are "cheaper". I refuted that in my original post above.
Your argument that they are of more value because of the software is subjective, not objective and the parent post acknowledged that. And no one is talking about 11" netbooks here which you introduced as a strawman to beat down PCs. There are a lot of 15" and 14" LAPTOPS (not netbooks, geez, are you stuck in 2008?) that can be obtained below $500(the Air is much more expensive).
At this point, the subjective comparison is between a $500 basic 10" iPad vs. a 14" or 15" laptop for $500 or cheaper and your claim is the iPad beats the laptop in value for the general public which is a highly debatable claim given the iPads lack of physical keyboard and small screen.
Who talked about "crappy netbooks on a tiny screen" ? When did you last shop for laptops? 2007?
See this:
Latitude E5510 Also Includes Intel Core i3 Dual Core 2.53GHz Windows 7 Home Premium 2GB 160GB 15.6" DVD ROM $499.00
That is neither a netbook, doesn't have a tiny screen either.
Whatever the post-PC devices might be, they don't seem to be cheaper than the PC devices.
What if you replace the 160GB drive with a solid state drive? Remember, the iPad uses SSD.
Remember, the iPad uses a 10" LCD(though IPS) vs. a 15.6" (a huge % increase in area).
The problem is that you can't really compare on specs. The problem I had with the article was that it compared it to the evolution from Mainframes to Minicomputers to PCs. Each step there, the cost was an order or more of magnitude cheaper(correct me if I am wrong).
When you can get "PCs" (a cheap crappy netbook is still a PC) for $280, the comparison falls apart completely.
Eg. You can get more than decent desktops for less than $500.
See:
Vostro 230s Also Includes Intel Core 2 Duo 2.93GHz Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit 2GB 500GB 21.5" Monitor DVD ROM $499.00
My problem was the premise of the article, not about the supposed "value" of the iPad.
This is an article about past paradigm shifts and their properties in general, not about whether or not tablets are actually another such paradigm shift, isn’t it?
It's just sales copy, relax. It wasn't written for you.