I find myself falling into this trap often: I scrobble a whosit over to my touchcomp, or, I don’t know, pull up an Instapaper page on my iPad, and think to myself “oh my, I’m living in the future!” But really I’m not. Look at the calendar, Paul. It’s 2011, and everything sucks.
Like, how many computers do I have right now? With nearly entirely different UIs? And zero commonality in file system? My MacBook Air (bless her), a Windows desktop, an iPad, an iPhone, an Xbox 360, a PS3… I’m living in madness! It’s a bourgeoisie hell! Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I can manage to slurp something into the cloud and get it onto another machine. My Xbox 360 can work as a Media Center Extender. Four of these six devices are somewhat compatible with Dropbox. The PS3 kind of has a browser.
Isn’t the promise of the post-PC era supposed to be simplicity? This doesn’t feel simple. Where do I get my music? Where should I create documents? Where should I store them? Should I store them? All the most “elegant” “solutions” for these problems feel more like hacks than solutions. Google Docs, Rdio, Dropbox, Gmail, AirPlay, Windows MCE, knife in the face. If I truly went post-PC and got rid of the MBA and the WD, I’d be in even worse shape. These devices all hate each other!
Alright, I get it, I’m supposed to drink the Kool-Aid and go all-in with one manufacturer. Just like how in the 50s if you didn’t buy all your appliances from the same manufacturer, your house wouldn’t turn on. Makes sense. So let’s try out Apple, shall we?
Nope, everything still sucks. It’s such a chore getting a document from my Macbook to my iPad and back again that I hardly bother. At least the music syncing works between the laptop and the tablet, and the laptop and the phone, though it’s certainly a lot of manual management to keep the right media on the right storage-strapped device. Photo libraries? With three different devices capable of capturing and storing pictures? A nightmare.
What’s the point of all my whining? Merely to say that I’m not on the hunt for a different way to do computing, and certainly not an additional way to do computing, I want a simpler way to do computing, full stop. If I’m trading from a single multi-purpose device for a myriad of single-purpose devices, where have I really gotten?
I don’t think of the iPad as a simple alternative to my PC. I think of it as a reset of PC UI and ideas; a chance to start over. It’s not about the touch screen or the form factor, it’s about a fresh opportunity to get things right. It’s up to the likes of Apple and Google to add enough functionality to their tablets or other post-PC devices so that my old windowed desktop becomes marginalized. Please, let it be marginalized! And if they can’t do that, I at least hope somebody figures out this whole cloud thing so that it doesn’t feel like an afterthought.
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Sounds like u want the webOS vision of the future
Good stuff! Google Docs/Live Mesh/Dropbox are a good start for keeping things in sync, and as for media, DLNA has made great strides, but until we have passive syncing across all devices/on demand from any connection, we’re going to live in a disjointed world.
And as for a combined UI across devices….until your whole life is on a cloud and can be DL’ed to anything you’re using (a glorified profile, as it were), we’re going to be stuck in each each manufacturer’s domain.
I think largely you’re correct. We have a fractured experience across all of our devices.
I think that until we have devices that we can control with our minds then we will not have a truly consistent UI. Different sized devices require different UX design. Do I wish that wasn’t so? Absolutely. Right now it’s a limitation upon what we can do.
The iPad desperately needs some sort of user-facing document feature to which all apps can save files, and they sync over-the-air between your devices. I’m thinking something like Dropbox, but built right into the OS.
that would be nice.
Good article. That’s totally how I see it. There’s a long way to go to a so-called PC era.
For my part, I could very well keep on living in this PC era. It’s great to have the possibility to go simple (Mac, iPad, etc.), but I want to stay flexible.
I would miss Drag-and-dropping, hacking config files and even solving problems.
WebOs vision promises a lot of changes in the right direction… Don’t you think?
I couldn’t have said it better myself, now inagine a normal user trying all this. The only reason it kinda works is bacause they don’t have as many devices. But this is what goes throughh my head when my mom asks me if an iPad can do everything a PC can do…
Call it wishful thiniking, but for some reason I think iOS 5 will finally make us realize what Apple plans to do with that new massive data center in NC.
Nice post…I feel ya. I think the real issue of keeping everything in sync is a matter of bandwidth, connectivity (what if one machine goes offline, does it become a useless device if you haven’t synced up?) and as the other two people said, a making a webOS or glorified profile / UI.
IMHO I think using the best pieces of gaming engines for a web OS would be great start. Unity3d is my current tool of choice because it works on windows, mac, iOS, android and can be viewed via the web. Not that I’m designing a webOS…but it would be cool if you could access your custom UI via all devices.
wow, very well said Mr. Miller. Currently i find myself yearning to purchase a tablet for myself but I too wonder where it will fit amoungst my myriad of other devices which all have their own OS’s and UI’s. Please keep the world informed as you search for the answers to this question.
I recently re-watched the Steve Jobs / Bill Gates dual interview from the D conference. That is where Steve originally mentioned this term “post-PC”, at least as far as I can tell. It is a pretty amazing thing to re-watch now–Steve had *just* announced the iPhone, the app store didn’t exist yet, and the iPad was still gestating in the great Apple womb. At several points in the interview, Jobs coyly says “we’re working on something, it’s going to be great, but I can’t talk about it”– and looking back, it is clear that even at that time he saw this entire ecosystem of the future, including the iPad. What’s even more remarkable is to listen to Bill Gates talk about his thoughts on the device of the future–if you didn’t know better you might think that he is describing the iPad, Xoom, or HTC Flyer (since he does talk about using “ink”).
Paul, you probably remember that interview, but I think you’d get a kick out of re-watching it, too. http://video.allthingsd.com/video/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-at-d/A72CB40D-3365-438D-A018-9A2AA2259E54/
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