So... there are a lot of allegations in here that aren't really backed up by evidence. My primary objection is that even should everything this guy (who is he?) comes to pass, "the browser" will remain the Latin to the Internet's Dark Ages, a Lingua Franca to patch all the holes left by the balkanization of the "online" experience. Consider: - Help files are now and likely always will be simple pointers to HTML code that can be updated by the vendor. Regardless of "apps" that run on iOS, Android, Linux, OS X, Symbian, Cobol or Turbo Pascal, some universal, simple, plain-text-readable repository of information will serve as the "help file" for that service on any device it runs and it's simply too easy to write it once than to write it a million times. Consider: we're now using markup that can encode video, but anything you download comes with either a .txt or .pdf. - the Internet is just another app. Regardless of what sorts of wonders you have on your device, the rest of the world is still out there. I don't have a crapload of apps on my phone, but of the apps I have, fully 40% of them have web browsers built in. It's system level, and it's free, and it allows them to plug the holes, as mentioned above. - Kids break rules. Rebellion is in the DNA of every person who ever walked the earth and for every locked door there's a person wondering what's behind it. Unless your purpose is to completely cut a person off from "the Internet" they will circumvent whatever safe walls you build just because you've built them. - The larger services are just APIs. My address book speaks Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. G+ is a layer that Google sprinkles on top of the entire internet. "Sign in with Facebook" is the kudzu of the new decade. What were destinations are now building blocks that any developer or writer can plug into his content. Comply with Facebook's TOS and you're in Facebook's ecosystem. The road's still there even if AMC is no longer making cars; "the Internet" remains a collective of mutual compatibility no matter what form you choose to navigate it with. - Laptops suck for browsing. Tablets suck for typing. I don't care how dead "the internet" is; you're still going to have to write a paper about Sitting Bull in 9th grade. Tell me the difference between a tablet with a bluetooth keyboard and trackball attached and a laptop - other than the OS. It's the same as browsing the Internet through Safari or browsing the Internet through 1Password - it's still a Quartz engine. It all strikes me as myopic ("Whatsapp has won messaging, text and instant" - ORLY) and overly sensationalist. Yeah, we interact with the Internet differently on a touchscreen tablet OS than we do on the desktop. We interect with the Internet differently through a Roku or XB360 than we do through a tablet. It's still the Internet. forums.bodybuilding.com will be forums.bodybuilding.com whether or not you install tapatalk. Reddit will be Reddit whether or not you're running AlienBlue. The Wikipedia I pull up on my phone is the same Wikipedia I pull up on my laptop is the same Wikipedia I pull up on my desktop is the same Wikipedia I pull up on my Kindle. There were people that freaked out when they realized that "today's kids have never lived in a time without Internet." They were wrong, too. It's a tool, not a religion, and when you see complaints nailed to the door consider them suggestions, not heresy.
I just want to say how much I agree with this. Every time there's an advance in technology, the elders get up in arms and say "My goodness! These kids today, they'll never know what it was like to live without their newfangled gizmos. Now us, we did it the traditional way, the REAL way..." How quickly we forget. Our parents tell us that we're not like them, that they didn't grow up with all this internet, all this information coming at them; it was different, simpler. Perhaps, but our grandparents would have been saying the same of TV. Our great-grandparents of cars. Don't doubt for a second there were people saying "yeah, printed text is great and all, but it will never beat good old-fashioned handwriting." (And that person would have forgotten his ancestor, some few centuries ago, complaining that "all this written language, it's ruining the oral tradition, why I bet our kids won't ever tell each other another story out loud again...") But no, this time, for real, kids won't "get" how things used to be done, and this is a generation of stupid kids who won't figure stuff out for themselves. This time, it's definitely it.There were people that freaked out when they realized that "today's kids have never lived in a time without Internet." They were wrong, too. It's a tool, not a religion, and when you see complaints nailed to the door consider them suggestions, not heresy.
We have fallen upon evil times,
the world has waxed old and wicked.
Politics are very corrupt.
Children are no longer respectful to their elders.
Each man wants to make himself conspicuous and write a book. Narim Sin, 5000 BC I've heard maybe five versions of this and I've never been able to narrow it down. Naram-Sin, for example, ruled about 2200BC, not 5000. I really want the quote to be authentic. the mood certainly is.
I think this is exaggerated, but what do I know. I'm part of the older generation. But desktops are going to be around for a while, if only because writing code on a tablet is uncomfortable at best.
Until you get an easier input interface that is superior to a mouse + keyboard this will likely remain the case. I can hardly see it lasting 10-15 years from now, though. Surely we will have something more intuitive and less clunky by then? I don't really know what I'm talking about either though, so who knows.
Is there really no alternative? Even something on a conceptual level? Maybe one of those helmet things that read the electrical impulses in your brain and translate that into a command? Man, this is depressing.
A Crash Course in Ergonomics (I have one quarter's worth of post-graduate bioengineering. An ergonomicist I'm not. However, here's what I can share without making an ass of myself) The closer to rest pose you can make a body, the longer that body can remain at rest pose. There are definite angles to have your display at, definite angles and heights to have your input console at, definite angles to have your seat back at in order to keep your blood from pooling, your nerves from being pinched, etc. Another basic is that the less you move, the longer you will be comfortable. CAD, gaming and fighter aircraft all have one thing in common - maximum visual input and minimal dextrous output. You'll note that when you design the cockpit of a fighter aircraft, everything is within reach. Control sticks on jets no longer even deflect - they use strain gages to get the full sweep of input from less than 1/16" of deflection. I can't really speak to gaming (I have a Wii - granted, I've also got a 92" screen) but I can speak to hell about CAD. Maximum display has always been something CAD operators have been willing to pay for and a phat CAD rig will play the hell out of Crysis, if you catch my drift. Back when I was in the thick of it I ran three 22" displays when 22" displays were $1500 each. I used to have a Mitsubishi whatever-it-was that was a 27" CRT, costing a mere $8k. The point being, you have a giant visual sweep for your eyes to take in. Eyes, you see, move pretty easily (so long as they don't go more than 10 degrees above the horizon or more than 65 degrees below and stick to 30? degrees deflection on either side). Fingers don't. A tablet works because you aren't using it much and it's only 10" across. Once you get into touch screens over a foot, repetitive strain sets in pretty quickly - POP displays in restaurants usually use 15" displays because you can mash them and they're easy but even POP displays are going towards touch screens now (as evidenced by Apple's ubiquitous iTouch consoles). A 20" touch screen is murder - now, to execute a single command you're reaching your damn shoulder across space, using every muscle in your arm when you could simply be clicking your finger on the mouse. 'cuz that's the thing - the resolution of a mouse and the dexterity of an operator means you can cover 3 22" displays with one nice 12" mouse pad. In order to sweep across my entire field of view I only need to move my wrist about six inches, twice. And that's infinitely adjustable depending on how I want it. Give me a button or control under every finger and I'll rule the world - I've been using an MX Revolution since 2004 and a Mouseman Wheel from 1998 before that. And you can use it all day, every day, using no muscles below your elbow. Lots of CAD operators use trackballs. They work pretty well, too. You have to move even less. In my opinion, however, they lack the precision. That's personal preference and others may disagree. Thing is though, even when you're getting into serious 3d command you're still talking about a mouse with function keys. Look at it this way - a mouse is basically a pantograph. It converts small movements into big ones. So long as we're dealing with X/Y data on a flat surface, the best way to control it is through X/Y data on a flat surface.
I think what you've covered is actually a bit different than what touch screen proponents have in mind. For serious work, you need a solution like the one you've outlined: an interface focused on long term use, even if it requires training to use. Many proponents of touch screens highlight the approach-ability of a touch screen. It requires minimal amounts of training, but it's rubbish for long term use or large sizes. Personally, I very much prefer the "efficiency and comfort over intuitiveness" approach. I am a die, hard keyboard/mouse user, and I edit text in Vim. I do think that the final win will be neural-computer interfaces, because then both catagories are satisfied: high easy of use and approach-ability, while requiring very little movement.
"neural-computer interfaces" are further off than you think. Even if you do decide to stick electrodes where electrodes don't belong (and you really shouldn't do that), finding the signals for fine motor control and then controlling for all the spurious stuff that isn't fine motor control is a hell of a lot more effort than, say, a mouse. I talked to the main brain imaging guy at the UW Dept of bioengineering back in 2005 to research a screenplay. One of those guys that was imaging thought using fMRI and the like back before it was cool. There's a whole bunch of "yeah, in theory we can do this, as soon as we solve this, that and the other thing, which we have no idea how to do, but we can see the pathway." I heard similar verbiage from Geoff Landiswhen I was consulting with him on crossing space-time using Visser wormholes. "Yeah, in theory we could open a gateway between two points as soon as we figure out how to harness 100% of the energy of a red dwarf star and if the reference points of the two ends are completely at rest because otherwise we have to absorb energy produced in accordance with Einstein's equation of general relativity." We use our fingers to do things. They've evolved for it. You might enjoy reading this. It illuminated a lot of the misgivings I had about UI and ergonomics that I hadn't been able to put into words.
Wow, what you've linked to is really a great read. As you said:
I think my random add-in about neural-computer interfaces was pretty much a non-sequitur, since I also realize that they are so far in the future as to be pretty irrelevant to the present.It illuminated a lot of the misgivings I had about UI and ergonomics that I hadn't been able to put into words.
We can always dream. Thing is, there has been a lot of progress lately that would lead one to believe we're getting closer. The issue is that when you learn more about it you have to recognize that even if you walk a few steps towards the South Pole every day you're still not going to get there any time soon.
That is easily the most detailed and thought-out responses I've ever got to anything. Thanks, in summation it sounds like the mouse and keyboard is here to stay...
If you hate mice you need to find a better mouse. I despised the stupid things until I found something that allows me to hold my wrist at a more natural angle. Tools you use a lot are worth the money. The keyboard, on the other hand, is kinda lame. Unfortunately there does not appear to be any easy answer.
The thought of using speech recognition to accurately output the endless stream on non-word characters that coding demands is frightening. I mean: int main(int argc, const char * argv[])
{ It would make me pack up and immediately go home :) We're a long way off from voice being an acceptable input for coding. I'm still waiting for Siri and Google Now to hear me every time I ask for a good burger joint. They're good, but they've a ways to go on just the basics.
} @autoreleasepool {
NSLog(@"Hello, World!");
}
return 0;
I think people may have thought that 20 years ago as well. I hope you're right!
Lol, there is definitely reason to be conservative in this case I think...
That's a process that started before tablets, as we've written about on the site: http://cultureramp.com/carving-up-the-world. My take is that laptop and desktop computers are gradually becoming the province of the professional and specialist. Tablets and smartphones will continue to make up a larger portion of the average person's experience with the Web simply because those venues deliver the promises of the Web without fewer obstacles and less confusion.
Me neither. But then, most people don't code and they stop writing essays after college, if they even write them that long. No, I don't think desktops and laptops will altogether disappear any time soon, but it's doubtful that they'll retain their dominance over the home market. More and more, they're going to be work machines.
Work machines and play machines. Tablets have games, but PCs have Games. Imagine Counterstrike on a touch interface. Imagine Dota. Good lord, imagine EVE Online. If a game demands more than a single input at a given time then just... Forget using a simple touch interface. I'm not disparaging what tablets and smartphones have because there's fun stuff on them! I love some of the offerings I've encountered. But PCs are going to be the province of competitive strategy, FPS, and MMORPGs for a good long time. There are some things the touch interface and the console control pad just can't handle, not as well.
I doubt that tablets and smartphones will remain restricted to touch interfaces. I'm not saying that desktops and laptops will whither away while mobile devices remain precisely as they are now. After all, how difficult could it be to make a keyboard or controller that works with a tablet? I've already seen people using independent keyboards with their iPads, and it's only a matter of time before they're distributed more evenly through the market. Peripherals are fair game, and in terms of hardware, mobile devices are just refinements of the evolution from desktop to laptop. What really matters in terms of usability and popularity are the differences in operating system. The closed garden system, which is easy to deride if you're already accustomed to navigating more open operating systems, is more intuitive and less confusing for most users. And there's no real reason you couldn't play Counterstrike on a closed system, provided the right peripherals. Those peripherals will arrive, so don't let interface issues cloud the advantages. Outside of work, most people simply don't need the big, open systems of the traditional OS native to desktop and laptop machines.
That's partly true but you're ignoring a few things, in my estimation. What's the difference between a tablet with a separate keyboard and mouse peripheral, and a laptop? Ummm... I will grant that it's marginally more portable, but otherwise, is there a functional change? But ok, let's say that portability alone makes it more likable than a laptop. How about the factor of price? Now, perhaps the trend will reverse in the near future, but I can guarantee you that as it stands, size of the machine almost always correlates positively with its power. I have a desktop and a laptop and I've used a tablet, all of which were purchased within a year of one another (actually, the desktop is a wee bit older admittedly) and the power of each is pretty much fits this correlation. The new iPads have some pretty nice capacity for graphics... for a mobile device. They have pretty good memory... for something using flash memory. They have a good processor... can you guess compared to what? Now, they could hypothetically make a tablet as powerful as my desktop, but it would be thousands of dollars. The best iPads right now cost half as much as my far better desktop did nearly 2 years ago, and I'm willing to bet they aren't half as powerful, with a small fraction of my RAM and disk space. Will tablets get better? Yeah, definitely. Will good tablets cost less? Yep. Will better still desktops keep getting released and will they be cheaper than comparable tablets? I'd put money on it. You can already see the model in laptops vs desktops. A laptop that can compete with my desktop in terms of power is much more expensive than the desktop, and not as modular. You can't upgrade a tablet. You cant give it more RAM to keep up with new trends and needs, you can't replace the graphics card, you can't even replace the disk. This alone degrades the value of the device significantly as a gaming platform. You say that gamers don't need the open space of current desktop and laptop OSs? Some, probably. Have you ever wanted to install a mod in Skyrim? Thousands and thousands of gamers don't just want to be able to do that, they do, and they expect every game to be able to handle that. On a closed OS you see on tablets, you can't do that stuff without significantly hacking the device. The tablet's closed system is not, currently, as viable as you are arguing for PC gaming for that reason alone. It's not that I disdain tablets, or think it's bad that people will start using them more (they will, heck I've been thinking of getting one soon), but I don't think, in their current state, they will be competition for the value of the desktop or laptop computer for things like work and gaming, until there's some serious changes to them. I think they will become an ubiquitous part of using the internet and entertainment (and yes, this does include games - of a certain variety) but for work (especially programming, but that's my professional bias) and "hardcore" (for lack of a better term on my tongue right now) gaming, the current desktop/laptop system is hard to beat on functionality, power, price point, and modifiability. For a user friendly experience, tablets will get better, and they'll get better at those other things as well. But I'm not as willing to jump to the assumption that they will be best any time soon.
I still think you're looking at this from the perspective of someone who values a relatively open OS. Many of the design decisions Apple made in producing the original iPad were made in order to mitigate some of those concerns. It doesn't matter that an iPad processor can't stand up next to a desktop processor, because iPad's don't multitask. It doesn't matter that they have relatively little memory compared to a desktop, because it's made for apps that use memory less aggressively. It doesn't matter that a desktop or laptop will beat a comparably priced tablet in nearly every spec because 95% of the people using them don't care about specs. They have a dozen or so things they want their tablet to do well, and it does those things reasonably well. But more importantly, it makes doing those tasks easier and less frustrating. That's a shift of paradigm. For a very long time, manufacturers have been building machines with the notion of stretching what's possible with a computer. But we're at the point where even the most basic computers on the market can do nearly everything that your average home user would want them to do. The new goal is to focus new machines on providing the best possible experience, and you don't do that by generalizing. Mobile operating systems are all about focusing on a single task or two, and making those tasks as easy and simple to carry out as possible. The "gamers want power and options" rationale may seem overwhelming to a dedicated gamer, but the fact of the matter is that desktops and laptop sales declined 4.6% last year. Smartphones outsold them for the first time last year, and tablet sales are rapidly catching up. Pew routinely reports that people are using mobile devices to get on the Web—to the exclusion of laptops and desktops. Your rationale also ignores the changing demographics within the gaming community itself. Social and mobile games are the most rapidly growing segment of the market. Changes in accessibility mean that indie game makers are increasingly developing for mobile and console/downloadable. Desktops are still the domain of the AAA developer, but they're increasingly catering to a demographic that's willing to pay top-dollar for a very specific experience. As I said before, I don't think desktops and laptops are in danger of extinction any time soon—just that they're going to become the domain of specialists. I do most of my computing on a laptop, but I recognize that I'm part of a shrinking minority in that regard. Very few people are programmers or writers with their own website. Most of us simply don't need computers the way they've traditionally been.
This seems needlessly dramatic. The very fact that tablets and smartphones are so limited will restrict them to their own particular niche, and leave some room for the more open devices like laptops and desktops etc. It's just like when TVs first came out - everyone thought that it would be the end of cinema as we knew it. However, as time went on people were still interested in cinema because it is different enough to be its own unique experience, and thus has its own place in the modern world. I think this analogy fits the whole Desktop vs Tablet situation.
I agree that it is exaggerated, but there will certainly be differences in the way the next generation approaches the internet. On a similar note, over the winter break I realized that my 12-year old cousin has almost never been exposed to any headphones except earbuds. As a result, he was talking about Beats with such awe as if they were treading new ground with headphones that actually covered your ears and sounded decent. New trends in tech are shaping the perceptions of generations that didn't know what came before. Sometimes it's a regression.
I disagree with a lot of this. The cornerstone of his argument is that Tablets will govern our entire experience with electronics. I disagree. I can't type for shit on a tablet. Until the input aspect is solved, companies will continue to use laptops and therefore keyboard and mouse inputting will still be important for kids to learn. PC gaming isn't going anywhere, and neither is 'the browser'. Sure, touch-sensitive apps will have the lions share of how we consume, but in terms of work and productivity, the desktop PC can't be beaten until they have some kind of magic ball that enters words based on how I flip it around, or something equally science-fictitious.
Mr. Doctorow at the boingboings did a thing about this, too.
I remember watching that keynote some time ago. I agree with kleinbl00 in that it's not the nature of the device (tablet vs. laptop) that will ultimately bring about more closed systems. The biggest threat is probably industry lobbying that backs up DRM, patents, etc.
Indeed it would seem that phone vs tablet is an interesting debate as well.The U.S. Copyright Office published a document on Oct. 26, specifying that while jailbreaking a smartphone is deemed legal, the same rules do not apply to gaming consoles or tablets like Apple's iPad or the Microsoft Surface.
|if kids don’t have laptops they don’t have pc gaming, and it’s hard to see why they would prefer consoles over tablets especially if I have to pay 10x as much when games are a $1 consumable like candy. I am confident that games on PCs, laptops and consoles would always be better and prettier than games on tablets. And gaming is a big reason why children and teenagers buy computing devices. So I dont think they would disappear. Serious gaming needs high performance computing and good peripheals, its not limited just for work.
A related theme is addressed in Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End in which the trend of technology has veered toward sealing hardware within inaccessible modules, so one cannot tinker with them. The motivation is the same whether in hardware or software: to reduce the extent to which an individual can reverse engineer a system. On the one hand this prevents maliciously motivated fiddling but on the other prevents learning by deconstruction and, more insidiously, could accustom people to be less inquisitive.
I think we're already seeing the results of partial applications of that technique. Computers used to require programming knowledge just to operate. Thus, an entire generation of computer-using children grew up to be the programmers of today's computers. Today's children are locked in Fisher Price GUIs on devices that can't write code, or even run unsigned that that you might somehow write. Computer Science enrollment is already down and will only continue to drop as fewer and fewer young people are able to tinker with computers.