2009-07-21
post/145949091
Marco.org: Update to “Serious doubts”
I keep meaning to write about my experiences with iPhone 3GS (look, Gareth, I’m even using Apple-approved brand constructions!) but I don’t seem to have got around to it yet, and as it fades into the everyday (as it has for everyone else already, seemingly) I may never do.
However, this line in Marco’s follow-up to his widely-read post about the App Store gets at one of the points I was going to mention. When I was a kid, I used to think about Moore’s Law, and the fact we seemed to have gone from computers the size of houses, to rooms, to a Spectrum in front of the telly, and what was next. How could it get any smaller? How would you be able to read it?
The usual obvious answer was “voice recognition”, which has turned out to be hilariously wrong. What I didn’t see coming - and what remarkably few people saw coming even nine years ago - was that you could turn the entire surface into both input and output.
Of course, Apple don’t sell iPhones as pocket computers, any more than Palm did (although Psion didn’t seem as shy of such branding), which is probably good, because the last couple of years have shown that devices like it are as different from microcomputers as they were in turn from minicomputers, and them in turn from mainframes.
Still, if I told myself as a child that I’d have a pocket computer powerful enough that it could play games that knocked the Spectrum into the dirt, along with music at the same time, and then look up almost anything from an encyclopedia, almost anywhere in the world, and in only a quarter of a century, I’m not sure I’d have believed it.
