The Next Thing That Comes First

[chipotle]

Against my better judgement, I’m going to write about the iPad. It’s been long enough that everyone’s already formed an opinion, I suspect; I’m going to start off by throwing a bit of cold water on some of the opinions I’ve been seeing.

Comments

[altivo]

Well, I'm still utterly unimpressed. But I have always been unimpressed by Apple products. It doesn't matter to them, they are experts at handwaving and marketeering. I agree that showmanship and marketing will upstage common sense every day of the year

[chipotle]

If you think Apple -- and even Adobe, really -- have done nothing innovative and that they've only been successful through marketing, then you have a very different view of computing history than I do. Then again, you paint yourself, more or less, as someone who thinks user interfaces got to about where they needed to be a quarter-century ago and everything since has been driven by marketing and flimflammery

[altivo]

Well, now, I don't demand a return to CP/M or DOS. It's true though that one of the things I absolutely hated about the Mac when I was forced to use one for several years was the total lack (at that time) of any command line interface. Obviously, that was before Apple made the paradigm shift to a Unix style kernel. More important to me though was the difference between cooperative multitasking (the style of both Mac and Windows back then) and pre-emptive time slicing (the style of Unix and the Amiga at that time, then not long after the basis of Linux

[aliasisudonomo]

While he wasn't totally accurate on every point, if you've never read it, look up Neil Stephenson's "In the Beginning there Was The Command Line".

If you have, then in a very real sense, you understand a graphical interface is not designed for you. The skills needed to manipulate the various abstract symbols and concepts that make up computer programming do not particularly overlap with the skills most people have.

The strength of Apple - and the weakness of most open source apps - is they don't let the programmers handle the UI. This inevitably results in a programmer-annoying UI, but one that other people can use and even enjoy using.

[brerandalopex]

[Brer] You summed up most of my general feelings, I think. Much like the first iPhone (which was also panned relentlessly in the media and elsewhere) this is a first round salvo into a market that has otherwise been pretty much sitting on its thumbs

[aliasisudonomo]

Well, it's not as if a tablet computer is some new thing that sprung from Steve Jobs' head as Athena from Zeus, any more than they invented the smartphone.

They'll make a very usable tablet and in all probability I expect to see the current netbook market be supplanted by a "net-tablet" market as a result. My netbook is neat and a Kindle is neat, but a device that could seamlessly do everything both did - just as well as the original devices - would be totally bitchin'.

In other words, do exactly to tablet PCs what they did to smartphones so I can buy the Googletablet (or whatever) running something open but about as good a year later. :D

[toob]

THIS is a very interesting and well-stated opinion piece. Thank you!