After reading this (sent to me by my good friend Mr. Gavan Brown begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting):
I had a thought…
Steve Jobs thinks that the future of computer is arrogance – ahem – I mean, he thinks it’s about Apples. But I disagree, I think it’s about Oranges.
Apple thinks the future of computing is on the “new PC” which is a hand held Apple device which is powered by the highly regulated App Store. Doomed to be only as good as the apps that Apple specifically approves (a lengthy process).
Key points of said device?:
It’s portable
Its wireless
Its options are limited by both hardware (no USB or media cards or standardized outputs) and governed software
No Flash
And currently,
And…
All I’m going to say is good luck to you Apple – your world take over is going to have to occur without the allocation of my personal American dollars. I’m simply not going to invest my money into a closed system with stagnant or limited innovation available to it.
Anyways, back to my original thought:
I personally believe the next killer “PC” is going to be a device not to far removed from what Apple believes fits the bill. Sure it *CAN* be hand held and it *CAN* be touch screen, but it also needs to be expandable by the end-user. This is where we differ.
Apple wants to decide for the end-user in regards to what is going to be an acceptable way to interface and use their product and tie into THEIR systems and limit to ability to scale this with other existing and open (or standardized) systems.
Here’s how my version plays out:
If people want to ram in their flash card from their camera / phone, they will be able to. If they want to slam in an external USB drive and dump those photos on to it, they can. If they want to transfer these or other files over their wired / wireless networks, also part of the deal. And if they want to push the images to a single or multiple video devices all they need is the standard hardware available to do so.
Apple undermines PCs far too much. The only thing that is going to replace your standard desktop computer is the Cloud as in Cloud computing.
If you have a computer system (hardware or virtualized) which is hooked up to some pretty good pipe on the Internet, the amount of things you can do now and will be able to do in the future is staggering. Plugging into that system and uses its raw processing power from a less powerful terminal device is absolutely going to happen, but it will not be Apple who takes us there. At least not with their current strategy.
The terminal device should be able to stream that output from the host device (securely) and do virtually anything the host PC can do directly through an assortment of technologies. The limitations should only be with the additional inputs and outputs of the hand-held device and its reduced form factor in terms of visibility / utility. However, you should be able to scale up the device with additional hardware as required but only through standardized hardware technologies can you achieve this result.
And on a sort of related note (related to a long ass post I’m working on that deals with the crippling affect on innovation with stagnant internet bandwidth) – check out http://stopthecap.com/tag/docsis-3/ And call your cable company and tell them to stop being stupid or you are going to switch back to dial up =)
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