I’ve been thinking a lot more about yesterday’s thoughts, and it occurred to me I’ve maybe been thinking about it all wrong. I’ve been into computers since about 1986 when I gained control over a Commodore 64 at work. On that machine, I learned BASIC, and a while later bought my first computer, a Commodore Amiga 500. Got into programming on that even more, and dug the demo scene, though only as an observer, not a hacker. My first PC was home built from a friend’s spare parts, and I built every desktop pc I ever had after that, carefully picking out the best motherboard, CPU, memory and all components one by one. For me, using a computer has always meant programming, hacking, diving into the internals.
But the reality is, for most computer users these days, it’s not about that at all. Today, for most users, “computers” are in reality simply consumer entertainment devices. They simply let people connect to friends via email, IM, and various social networks, play some games, listen to music and watch videos. This is why the iPhone is so popular. It does all that wonderfully. This is why the iPad is so successful. This is why I never got the iPad. I kept looking at it as a computer. I couldn’t figure out how you could do anything productive on it. And it always made me laugh to see people hook up their little stands and keyboards to their iPads to try to pretend it was a real computer. But taken as a personal communication and entertainment device, and realizing that that is all most users want or care about, it makes total sense.
Virtually everything shown in yesterday’s presentation points in this same direction. iLife, the App Store, the new Mac Book Airs. It’s all about consumer devices. As I mentioned in a comment to yesterday’s post, a closed environment app store in that situation makes total sense.
What concerns me in this scenario though, is where does that leave serious computer users and programmers? There are no new Mac Book Pros, no new Mac desktop machines. The big item was the new Air, a lighter, smaller, more underpowered, understoraged, overpriced device, again ideal for consumer communication and entertainment. I guess the days of yearning for the faster CPU, bigger hard drive, and more memory are over. It’s all about weight, thickness, and battery life.
My view now is that maybe we’ll see a split in the OS, with a more walled garden app store-centric model optimized for MB Air type devices, kind of iOS on steroids, and another more full featured, full OS designed to run on some hopefully some new MB Pros with more horsepower, for the power users. Again, wild speculation.