unconscious

Final thoughts on the Apple Tablet

—January 26, 2010

So Apple’s big announcement is tomorrow and everyone’s throwing out their last minute predictions so I figured I’d speak my peace on the whole thing. Here’s what I expect Apple to release tomorrow: a 10 inch iPod Touch with 3g and maybe a forward facing camera. Apple has a penchant for stripping out everything that’s unnecessary and as we get closer to the announcement and more and more leaks have sprung up I think I see where they’re going with this. Previous tablets have tried to do too much, they all tried to retain all the laptop features they could while becoming cumbersome overpriced toys that, let’s face it, didn’t really work all that well. I think Apple sees through this. Most of what we do on computers these days isn’t creation, it’s consumption. We browse webpages, look at photographs, search for things, read email and sometimes dash off a quick response.

There’s a need in the market for something geared entirely towards consumption and that’s where Apple is going with this. The deals they’ve made with publishers are all about consumption. Amazon has taken a stab at this with the Kindle, but it tries to do too little. Books are the least of what people read on a daily basis. Give publishers a way to get their content, magazines, books, textbooks, etc into your hands on a great screen in full color, toss in a browser, third party applications and an email client and you have a killer machine geared towards 90% of what people use computers for these days. Add to that a way to store documents for later viewing and possibly light editing and you have quite a few business bases covered too.

Immediately after the announcement you’re going to have people complaining about the lack of a hardware keyboard, lack of an x86 processor, lack of this, lack of that. Complaints that you can’t edit a spreadsheet on it, or typing up a Word document is too cumbersome. The response to the critics is that It’s Not For That, and if you want a laptop, you know where to find one. This is going to solely be for consumption and it will be amazing for that.

Now, if they can just keep from selling it for 700-1000 bucks we might have something here.

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The HP slate device.

—January 6, 2010

Tonight’s announcement of the HP slate device would be hilarious if it weren’t so utterly depressing. Hardware manufacturers and software developers have spent at least the last two decades trying to free us from the keyboard and yet here I am, still typing on something that hasn’t fundamentally changed since 1867.

I’m starting to think that’s for a good reason and the industry’s ill conceived efforts aren’t really doing anything to convince me otherwise.

Apple may or may not release an awesome tablet at the end of this month, but I guarantee you that if it does come out, the last thing the user interface will resemble is going to be a retail copy of Mac OSX. There’s a solid reason for that: The Apple tablet won’t be a general purpose computer. It’ll be used to watch movies, read textbooks, manipulate data and visualize things, but the last thing you’ll be doing on it is typing a term paper. If you don’t have a general purpose computing device, you don’t need all the UI cruft that surrounds it. Purpose built applications will run to make the most of the user interface, otherwise the OS needs to just get out of the way and let people pick an application they want to run. I don’t know how you’d implement the ideal interface for that but I’m damned sure it won’t include a start menu.

Anyone remember Pen computing in the mid 90s? Everything was going to be done with a stylus? Remember how that went away when people realized that nobody wants to use a stylus? Remember how tablets were going to revolutionize everything yet everyone you know is still sitting there with a keyboard and trackball and keeping their butter and coffee covered hands mitts off the screen? Yeah, I do too.

Did Ballmer expect anyone to actually get excited about what amounts to a touchscreen running a bone stock Windows 7 install, start menu included? We’ve seen this before, for 15 years now and this is what they’re showing the keynote of the largest tech convention of the year? What’s the point?

Here’s a freebie since they obviously can’t figure out anything on their own:

They have Surface. Take that interface, make a demo that runs on the Slate and suddenly you have something that’d get people interested. Two technologies that are already there, in their stable, and they could have just glued them together and have it work. Get some UI people to design sample applications. Release an SDK for it complete with a simulator. It’s a product that Microsoft already has but they just can’t figure out to put the pieces together. Tell me a portable 10 inch version of the Surface woudn’t be huge. Subsidize the hell out of it XBox style to get the pricepoint down to 400-500 bucks and you’d leapfrog Apple by at least a year.

Just get it together already. I really want something to come out that gets me excited again.

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Seriously Microsoft, how is this even possible?

—August 29, 2009

At work I have to work on a lot of Windows servers, and I’ve found that Microsoft’s client is the least buggy of the Mac RDP clients in most cases (as in, it picks up my keystrokes and mouse clicks and accurately displays the screen). Apparently the client sometimes moonlights calculating asteroid trajectories or something because 99% of the time when I start getting beachballs or general slowdowns, or my MacBook starts microwaving my testicles, activity monitor shows this:

Screen shot 2009-08-29 at 2.36.19 PM

How is this even possible on a machine with only two cores?

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This category seems a little specific, but OK.

—August 28, 2009

Screen shot 2009-08-28 at 5.41.55 PM

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Why I hate social networking features.

—July 17, 2009

Cronkite

Google Reader just came out with a pointless “like this” feature, for some reason. As if anyone cares what someone else thinks about a post. The only good thing to come out of it is the unintional hilarity of people “liking” that Walter Cronkite died.

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