iPad And The Stubbornness Of the Status Quo

Steven Frank:

The Old World

In the Old World, computers are general purpose, do-it-all machines. They can do hundreds of thousands of different things, sometimes all at the same time. We buy them for pennies, load them up to the gills with whatever we feel like, and then we pay for it with instability, performance degradation, viruses, and steep learning curves. Old World computers can do pretty much anything, but carry the burden of 30 years of rapid, unplanned change. Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X based computers all fall into this category.

The New World

In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed, then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus scanners, their batteries last longer, and they rarely crash, but their users have lost a degree of freedom. New World computers have unprecedented ease of use, and benefit from decades of research into human-computer interaction. They are immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the 80% of the famous 80/20 rule.

Is the New World better than the Old World? Nothing’s ever simply black or white.

Jim Stogdill:

The iPad is the iPrius: Your Computer Consumerized

❝Yesterday, Apple got all of the geeks glued to their screens waiting for the "Jesus Tablet," iPad. An hour later, they were twittering that it did not come. Or maybe it just wasn't their Jesus?❞

M. Alvares's Understanding Multi-tasking on the iPad: What is it really?:

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To be able to perform more than one task on a computer has been heralded since the first GUI based computer first showed up—the Macintosh the MultiFinder extension for the Macintosh in 1988. But it’s a bit hasty call on the iPad’s lack of multi-tasking, when in fact most people don’t understand what it really is.
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