Alex Watson
I didn’t know how to answer, in part because her question strikes at a key issue with the iPad itself, and in part because it actually illuminates one of the big trends in technology at the moment.
Let’s take the iPad first. It’s something of a divisive product. If the week with my family taught me anything, it’s that your opinion of the iPad is really shaped by your preconceptions. Go to it expecting it to behave like a computer – with industry-standard ports, an operating system where you can install whatever software you like and have full control over the file system – and you’ll be disappointed. With its ban on Flash, its inability to install software from outside the iTunes walled garden and lack of USB and HDMI, it seems like so much less than it could have been.
Yet this viewpoint is essentially that of Charles H Duell, Commissioner of the US Patent Office, who, in 1899, had the good sense to write that surely ‘everything that can be invented has been invented’. The story may well be apocryphal – it’s up there with Microsoft boss Bill Gates saying 640K of Ram was enough for anybody, and Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, optimistically declaring there was a world market for ‘maybe five computers’. It’s exactly the same feeling as that of the iPad detractors who essentially believe that since we have already invented the computer, there is no need for the iPad.
However, if you’re someone with no great love for computers, the iPad seems marvellous. It makes no noise, doesn’t get hot and programs start as instantly as a DVD. The battery lasts so long you basically don’t need to worry about turning it off. There’s little in the way of annoying pop-ups or nagging prompts from the system. It’s really a radical reimagining of what a computer is: not a general-purpose tool, but a self-negating device that tries, as much as possible, to get out of the way so you can access the digital stuff that exists in the computer ecosystem: music, photos, movies, news from your friends.
In this respect, the question ‘is the iPad a computer’ leads naturally onto a much bigger inquiry: what’s not a computer? In terms of hardware, the iPad is little more than a screen, a few chips and a battery. It still amazes me when I put my iPhone 4 next to the iPad that from a hardware point of view, they’re the same – the only differences are the visible ones, namely the screen and the bigger battery to drive that. The core – the chips, the backend – are exactly the same. It’s even weirder to think that my little phone has double the storage of my iPad (the latter was bought for me by work; they went cheap, for 16GB. I’m not too fussed. As I wrote in a previous column, much of my stuff is in the cloud anyway).
Within a few years, your TV will also be a computer because there’s simply no reason for it not to be: wireless networking chips are cheap and the screen is already digital. The TV is the obvious contender to be a computer; I talked in last issue’s column (see MacUser, 19 November 2010, p76) about new display technologies, which will mean that we’re capable of putting screens cheaply and easily into lots of locations. Indeed, it may well be outside our houses that these technologies really find their true home.
We’re moving towards a world where a computer is just a screen, a cheap CPU and a wireless network connection – and perhaps not even a screen. A computer may well be just a wireless connection, a few sensors, a CPU and an API.
‘So I can Google my socks?’ you might facetiously ask, but seriously consider how useful it would be if the key amenities and fixtures on your way to work could communicate and be polled by software. The council could know if the streetlights need replacing or an app on your phone could be able to read the times off the display at the bus-stop that says when the next bus is coming. It sounds techno-utopian, and perhaps it is, but the idea that our urban environment has, for want of a better term, a ‘cyber’ architecture as much as a physical one is increasingly the case. Experiments in the nascent field of ‘Everyware’ aren’t all that common at the moment, but one that’s well worth a look is Pachube (pachube.com). It allows you to ‘store, share and discover real-time sensor, energy and environment data from objects, devices and buildings around the world’. Browsing the site, which ambitiously aims to build the ‘Internet of things’, you can see a range of data from the temperature of offices in Spain to CO2 values from sensors in New Zealand. It’s arguably not got to the point of being developed enough to be practical, but as we’ve seen from the development of many Internet services, data is just the first step.
Technology’s ever-downward sweep in terms of price and availability conspires to make the computerisation of the wider world inevitable. Whether it’s desirable, and whether it’s a trend that empowers us and makes our lives better, or whether it’s a way of adding stress is, of course, entirely debatable.
A key part of saying a computer is ‘just’ a screen and a few commodity chips is the idea that they’re backed by huge amounts of power and storage in the cloud. As the computer moves from being a noun – a beige box, a silver laptop – to a verb, a large amount of information and a small amount of computational power, distributed and dissolved throughout the world, Apple faces some unique challenges. I’ve written before that the hardest thing for Apple will be dealing with the fact that this trend makes cloud computing and data services important, an area in which Apple isn’t strong. However, the benefit of selling so many iPhones and iPads is that Apple’s ubiquity ensures it a huge part of this ‘Everyware’ conversation. For instance, some of the best apps, certainly if you’re in a city, are those that specialise in getting you travel information from the underground, metro and train systems, and this in turn creates a pressure to cater to Apple devices. There’s another area where Apple (and other mobile and IT vendors) have a weak spot, and that’s the overlap between virtual and digital, which I’ll cover next issue.
I’ll end this column back where I began, with my two goddaughters. While Holly was interested in whether the iPad was a computer, it’s interesting that the question about what the iPad is didn’t occur to Lauren, the younger of the two girls. I suspect that by the time she grows up, the distinction will be irrelevant: the majority of things in her life will be, at some level, computers.
