What does the Apple tablet mean to computing?
There is an enormous amount of hype about the Apple tablet computer, and rumors about it swarm like mosquitoes in Manila. Is there more to the tablet than hype and rumor? Will it change how we live and compute?
There is more to the soon-to-be-announced Apple tablet computer than smoke and mirrors. Looked at from the perspective of the evolution of computing in our society, it could be seen as another of those turning points that make a difference in how we live and work. For 60 years, we have been trying to make computers smaller, and for almost that long we have been trying to make them more widely useful.
The tech industry really hit high gear in these quests during the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of widely available personal computers, then stepped on the gas again 20 years later when laptops began to add portability to the computing mix. The size of computers had been reduced from the size of a large room to the size something easy to carry, and so much personal and business functionality had been added that we were finding it hard to do without our computers.
Miniaturization and portability became the words of the day, until finally smartphones like the iPhone appeared. Suddenly we were carrying a real computer, capable of running a wide variety of applications and communicating across a wide spectrum, in our shirt pockets or purses. Unfortunately, the iPhone is a trifle small for our current input and output methods: a very small touchscreen and not much viewing area. Until our methods of doing typing characters and viewing objects change for the smaller and better, we simply need something larger than an iPhone, an interim step between that and the laptop.
The iTablet is just that interim device. The larger size gives Apple more hardware real estate in which to build a better computer and gives users more touchscreen real estate on which to type and view. Looked at from this perspective, the tablet is an interim step to true computer portability, to a powerful computer in our pockets. As new methods of input and output become available (look at how quickly touchpad gesturing took hold) and as miniaturization continues on its relentless path, we will find ourselves back to an iPhone-sized device that will serve all of our automation needs: computer, communication, media, and everything else, probably with a substantial component of in-the-cloud storage.
The iTablet is just a stepping stone to our totally portable future, when we can keep our personal lives and our business lives with us at all times, stored in and managed by a computer and controlled (mainly) by ourselves. Look how quickly we have come from the first PC to notebooks and from notebooks to iPhones, and take careful note that the pace of computing improvement is accelerating. The reality of truly powerful, truly portable computing is just around the corner. After that, Singularity?
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