“PCs are going to be like trucks”

Steve Jobs in 2010:

When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farms. Cars became more popular as cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic transmission became popular.

PCs are going to be like trucks. They are still going to be around…they are going to be one out of x people.

This transformation is going to make some people uneasy…because the PC has taken us a long ways. It’s brilliant. We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it’s uncomfortable.

We are just scratching the surface on the kinds of apps for the iPad…I think there are lots of kinds of content that can be created on the iPad.

When I am going to write that 35-page analyst report, I am going to want my Bluetooth keyboard. That’s 1 percent of the time. The software will get more powerful. I think your vision would have to be pretty short to think these can’t grow into machines that can do more things, like editing video, graphic arts, productivity. You can imagine all of these content creation possibilities on these kind of things. Time takes care of lots of these things.

This year, about five times as many smartphones will be shipped versus PCs, and tablets will surpass PCs for the first time. According to Jobs, the right way to look at this isn’t that mobile devices are creating a new market. It’s that mobile devices are relegating PCs to special-purpose, mostly industrial devices.

Dan Wolchonok

Do you think a single company will manufacture the truck, the family wagon, and the sports car in your analogy? Will we see continue to see iOS and OS X unite and leverage assets between the two, or do you think that the big successful companies will have to specialize into only one type of experience?

http://www.lowpan.com Jon Smirl

Wait until Chinese Android pads hit the US in force. They haven’t arrived here yet in large numbers but they are selling in Asia in large volumes.

Quad-core ARM Cortex-A9 10.1″ IPS tablet for $99
http://armdevices.net/2013/02/26/99-actions-quad-core-arm-cortex-a9-10-1-ips-tablet-by-hott/

Pads are on their way to being disposable. Buy one, sync it to the cloud, throw it away before your trip home.

Anonymous

That’s a brilliant idea! Except you don’t need to buy one, just rent one. You can go many ways with that idea then.
Anonymous

You’re playing games with semantics.

Calling a big feature phone a “pad” does not mean it is the equivalent of an iPad, which is a tablet PC, not just a tablet. The functionality is not the same. iPod nano also has a touchscreen, but is not equivalent to iPad.

Further, the $99 tablet will last at most 1 years, and give you at most 3 hours on a charge. An iPad will last 2–3 years, and give you 10 hours on a charge. You have to buy 3 of those $99 ($297) tablets to get the same number of days of use as a single $329 iPad mini, but the iPad mini will give you more than 3x the battery life and therefore usage per day, so the iPad is actually 1/3rd of the price per hour of use (3 cents an hour for iPad mini versus 9 cents per hour of no-name tablet use.) Plus, many users of a $99 Android tablet will have to also buy a Windows PC, while most iPad users do not.

I don’t know about Asia, but here in the US, people are very, very used to paying $329-and-up for a computer. What is happening in the US is that people who bought a $329 HP netbook in 2010 are replacing them with $329 iPad mini in 2012-2013. The iPad mini is much smaller and lighter and more mobile, it is much better made, it does exponentially more things, it is easier to use, and it is easy to have with you 24/7 so you can use it anytime that the need arises. It’s a great deal.

I think the thing you are missing is that a $99 Android tablet is a PC accessory — iPad is a PC. Devices like Kindle Fire, Nexus 7, and their cheaper no-name versions compete with iPod, not with iPad.

http://www.optimizeandprophesize.com/ jonathanmendez

Maybe worth mentioning the two best selling “cars” last year were both trucks?

http://www.cdixon.org/ chris dixon

I took him to mean industrial use trucks e.g. on the farm.

http://twitter.com/manuelmakris Emmanuel Makris

I dont think thats what he meant, but jonathon brings up a good point. I could see the mobile/tablet market dominance being spread out, the pc’s having few huge sellers with specialized pcs doing low volume (trucks on the farm)
Anonymous

Yes, me too. If you are talking SUV (or Ute as we call it in Australia) then I don’t really consider it a truck. Truck is used for hauling freight or heavy duty work.
Anonymous

I also took it to mean the kind of truck where you see chicken coops on the back — used by farms to ship their produce to market. Bigger than a pickup truck, smaller than a big rig. Steve Jobs specifically mentioned farms.

Taking the back off a car and putting on a pickup bed doesn’t really make it a truck. It’s just a different kind of station wagon.

http://kidmercury.posterous.com/ kidmercury

#upvoted. also worth mentioning is that the industrialized world would collapse overnight without trucks. trucks are hugely important, not some obsolete vehicle.

Dierdre Popov

Well put. Trucks of all forms are not only important in themselves as a mode of transportation, but important in the ecosystem of all vehicular traffic. Cars would be significantly impacted if trucks dwindled away to nothing, as would trains, ships, and planes.
Anonymous

Even Steve Jobs in 2010, right after launching the iPad, did not suggest there was no longer any need for the Mac.

But iPad is definitely the primary computer now. The Mac is an iPad accessory for programmers, publishers, music and movie producers.

If you look at the Mac in the late 1980′s, there was the Mac itself plus a LaserWriter printer and then a pad of paper that had come out of the printer with your work on it. iPad replaces the pad of paper with your work on it. A USB cable between iPad and Mac replaces the LaserWriter.
http://bsoi.st/ bsoist

Isn’t that the point? They are necessary, but not everyone needs one.

http://www.facebook.com/sean.mcdirmid Sean McDirmid

I’m sure you mean the states right? I don’t think that is true in another other country except for maybe Thailand. Also, I think more cars are sold in the states as a category than cars.

http://osnews.com David Adams

We are talking about the US market, and it’s not that trucks are more popular than cars in the US, but that the most widely-sold motor vehicle in the US is the Ford F-150 pickup truck. And of course they are purchased by many, many people who rarely, if ever, haul any cargo.

Anonymous

And many people don’t use their PCs for anything but browsing the web. So people will continue to buy PCs because they want to believe they need one, or because they actually do but for only 1% of the time.

Anonymous

Yes, that is true. The people who continue to buy trucks will likely be those that need them, and those that only want them.

I have a friend who asked me what pro-quality camera would be good for taking landscape shots as he climbed mountains, and I recommended a Lumix GF1 because it has a pro sensor but the mirrors are removed and it is all metal and ruggedized and small compared to a typical pro camera, and can be with him all the time to get the maximum number of shots. But he complained it was too small and people would think it was a point-and-shoot. So he bought a giant plastic Canon studio camera, and he leaves it behind when he climbs mountains because it is too big and too much hassle, and he takes iPhone shots instead. (Facepalm.)

That same friend has almost no Mac or Windows skills, because he is a nurse, yet he has a MacBook Pro he struggles with and refuses to even try an iPad. He looks at iPad like it is a kid’s table.

But the saving grace to all this is only about 1 billion people own a Mac or Windows PC (truck.) Everyone else wasn’t even interested in owning their own computer until iPhone and iPad (cars.)

http://dodgycoder.net dodgy_coder

When you say trucks do you mean utility vehicles / pickups (known as ‘utes’ in Australia)? If so then I think the rest of the world has a different definition of a truck.
http://twitter.com/trisweb Tristan

Worth noting the actual statistics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automotive_industry#Top_vehicle_manufacturing_groups_by_volume

Cars outnumber truck sales over 300% worldwide. In the US they’re about even.
Anonymous

The US which has a pretty unique obsession with trucks and SUVs.

raywal

Ever been to Dubai?

http://www.lowpan.com Jon Smirl

The iPad is the effect, not the cause. The cause is the rise of the Internet and cloud computing. Take away the cloud and an iPad is fairly worthless. PC were standalone devices. The rise of the cloud has greatly reduced the need for a ‘personal’ standalone computer.

http://www.cdixon.org/ chris dixon

Definitely.
Dierdre Popov

The personal computer was developed by a broad cohort of people, including Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who shared the profound ethos that individuals should be able to entirely control what they did with their own computer.

This was a specific reaction to the previous several decades of computing, which placed much of the power of the devices in the hands of large corporate entities.

Cloud computing does many things, but one thing that it clearly does is recentralize and recorporatize key aspects of computing (most especially the storage of your own data.)

Because it does this, and because the corporate structures which control the centralized infrastructure act entirely in their own interest, I see it as inevitable that we will reprise the tide-turning efforts of Woz and others against today’s default acceptance of cloud computing.

It may take a while, or even a new generation of people, and will very likely require whatever comes after post-cloud computing, in order for this to happen. But the desire to be free is almost impossible to override.

http://www.lowpan.com Jon Smirl

In the mainframe days you only had one choice to connect to. People wanted independence and thus the PC was created.

The cloud is very different. It is like having a million mainframes to connect to. Everyone should find a few mainframes in that pool that they are willing to use. Plus it is very easy now to create your own mainframe.

The pendulum is not going to swing back this time.

Dierdre Popov

Today’s cloud has the potential to deliver a million different service endpoints to your fixed-function device, but at least by our present generation’s judgment, it’s overwhelmingly failed in this regard.

For all of the basic services that’ve been created (search, social networks, picture sharing, etc.) there are just a few choices for that service in the cloud–often just one.

That’s regress, not progress.

http://www.lowpan.com Jon Smirl

Go build some more endpoints if you don’t like the current set. There really is nothing stopping you. Build a better mousetrap and people will come for sure. It has already happened many times on the Internet/cloud.

And none of those services you mention could have been implemented on a standalone PC – they all rely on the public Internet.

Anonymous

I know what you are trying to say, but you’re forgetting that HTML standardization is a total failure and that all of the cutting-edge consumer content development happens today on iOS.

There are Web developer conferences that are 10 or more years old and people gather there to talk about iOS development now. There’s nothing new to talk about in Web development.

What HTML5 promised, Apple delivered with CocoaTouch and App Store.

Building a great Web app now takes a team of 8 or more. You have to have 1 person just to deal with Internet Explorer. You have to have 1 person just to deal with the lack of ISO media support by Mozilla and Opera. You have to have 1 person to do the server-side stuff. You have to have 1 person to maintain the server. But 1 person alone can build a great iOS app.

So I think Dierdre’s point is well made. There are very few great apps on the Web, while there are hundreds of thousands of great apps on iOS.
Walt French

“If you don’t like the news, go make some of your own.” Always good advice.

Anonymous

Whereas every category of app on iPad offers you hundreds of choices, all working with the same store of photos, videos, music, movies, books, and documents that are stored locally on your iPad, because the app is also running locally.
Walt French

Yes, and in the early days of the Automobile Era, you could get your car in any color so long as it was black. Was mass production a step backward? Hardly; it was necessary to shift the economics of the industry.

I believe that the half-life of dominant technologies is shrinking, not expanding, as it becomes ever easier to go from a concept to raising capital, writing code and marketing a service. Once a service gets a foothold it can start connecting to other services in new & creative ways — again, much more rapidly than it ever could in the non-internet days when getting e.g., Microsoft to open up its Windows APIs took court battles extending years.

Anonymous

There’s no pendulum. iPad is just as much a PC as the Mac is.

All that has happened is this:

1) start with a Mac
2) replace the Ethernet+Wi-Fi with Wi-Fi+cellular
3) replace the mouse user interface with a touch user interface
4) replace the mouse app interface with a touch app interface
5) replace the Intel-based motherboard with an ARM-based system-on-a-chip
6) replace the hard disk drive with solid state storage
7) replace the mechanical keyboard with a soft keyboard
8) lock down the security a level further to make it even more consumer-friendly
9) rename it iPad.

Nothing essential has changed. It’s still a PC. Boot a Mac and an iPad and you’re booting xnu/Darwin on both, you’re running CoreGraphics on both, you’re running Cocoa and HTML5 apps on both. A network connection is not required in either case.

Notice that “the cloud“ (and also iCloud) work on both iPad and Mac. The cloud works over Wi-Fi+cellular or Ethernet. The cloud works with Pages for iPad or Pages for Mac.

Anonymous

iPad is not a cloud computer. It’s a typical personal computer except with mouse interfaces replaced by touch interfaces (both user interface and app interface.) iPad has large local storage containing an operating system, native apps, and content stores. It works with or without a network connection. Same as a Mac.

You have to be careful with Apple’s naming. If iPad was named “MobileMac” it would be more accurately named. If iPhone was named “PocketMac” it would be more accurately named. iOS is just a mobile OS X. iOS apps are just mobile Mac apps.

ChromeBook is a cloud computer, which used to be called a thin client. It boots up into a “shell” — in this case a Web browser — that shows you content from a server, and the local storage is just cache. Notice ChromeBook Pixel, the new high-end ChromeBook, has 32GB or 64GB of local storage and comes with 1000GB of cloud storage. Notice that iPad is the opposite: it has up to 128GB of local storage and comes with 20GB of cloud storage. With ChromeBook, your main data store is the cloud and the local store is just a cache for whatever chunk of data you’re working on right now — with iPad, your main data store is the iPad, and the cloud is secondary and holds backups and shared documents.

So the PC revolution that Apple started in 1977 is still in full swing today with iPad. It’s simply been refined to be even more personal, even more accessible, useful in more contexts and by more users and on pervasive wireless networking instead of wired.
http://twitter.com/dotpeople dotpeople

> Because it does this, and because the corporate structures which control the centralized infrastructure act entirely in their own interest, I see it as inevitable that we will reprise the tide-turning efforts of Woz and others against today’s default acceptance of cloud computing.

The original Maemo/Meego vision was sound and is still being pursued by Jolla in Finland, with an early customer in China Mobile. The vision was an open software ecosystem that scaled across all mobile form-factors, including phones, tablets, cars, plug computers and TVs.

Why does Apple block local PDF printing (content export) on iOS? Why does mobile Safari not allow extensions, or have a “View Source” button? Why are there no third-party mobile email clients on iOS?

Technology implements social values, which originate in economic contexts. Apple sandboxing and content export blocks serve one set of stakeholders, at the expense of others. Many gain from the network effects of popular platforms, but an Apple monoculture is as bad for consumers and industry as any Microsoft or Amazon monoculture.

Why is “free” jailbreak about to disappear? Because the economic value of an iOS zero-day increases as the monoculture diffuses. More targets and higher-value targets attract bigger buyers for exploits. If a developer has found an exploit to jailbreak iOS, should they give it freely so that users may escape digital restraints, or should they sell it to criminals who want to break into your semi-protected iPad?

Linux and open-source Unix derivatives took a long time, but they are now pervasive. The next step is to decouple systems (OS) programming from UX, security from usability. This is possible with virtualization, which is exactly how the public cloud arbitrates between private and public interests. The same technology can restore freedom on the client.

Walt French

@dotpeople wrote, “Why does Apple block local PDF printing (content export) on iOS?”

You really need to get out more before making these bizarre claims. Printing a PDF is dead simple when you have a printer with iOS awareness, or a network that has a wifi-accessible driver. Exactly the same as for every other printing technology I’m aware of.

Or are you talking about converting some iOS document to a PDF format so you can send the PDF to somebody else? In that case you’re moving back into the “industrial truck” mentality. Just as my little Acura isn’t meant for hauling ATVs up to the mountains, iPads claim to make common, individual-user tasks easy, not to be built for every possible computer-capable job.

http://twitter.com/dotpeople dotpeople

Print *to* PDF was an implemented feature of the virtual printer on the iPad1 and iPad2, used by multiple apps. The feature was removed by Apple in later OS updates. I have an iPad2 where this works and an iPad4 where it does not.

There are many uses for capturing a portable document from one application, while retaining the layout, without an intermediate paper copy. Adobe can explain further.

Proof that this is a “common, individual-user” task can be found in sales of the previous “print to pdf” apps, along with sales of the “save to pdf” converter apps that are currently attempting to replicate PDF printing via document conversion. Of course, it doesn’t work as well as a virtual printer, for obvious technical reasons.

Of course, Apple is free to impose any conditions within its walled garden, e.g. to prioritize the blocking of consumer-oriented content export over the needs of paying customers to move user-created or corporate content between apps.

But we should not confuse ourselves into mistaking Apple’s business decision for a technical constraint or an absence of customer demand.

Walt French

Hmmm, I’m not seeing people rebel against other slightly-less-recent networks: telephones (incl cellphones), highways, electricity.

Yes, some people want to live off the grid but individuals in remote rural (and sunny!) parts of the US are by definition in a tiny minority.

AFAICT, the early computer hobbyists were seeking access to (corporate-produced) computer technology, not trying to avoid IBM. The early phone hackers were trying to get around Ma Bell’s ridiculous tariffs for “long distance” calls, not to get away from her network.

It’s about empowerment, not distancing.

Anonymous

I don’t think it is specifically the cloud that demands iPad, but rather just pervasive wireless Internet via Wi-Fi and cellular is what demanded that iPad be invented.

If you are being irradiated by wireless Internet everywhere you go, 24/7, then you might want to carry a computer with you everywhere you go, 24/7, so that you can utilize that wireless Internet. If you’re carrying the computer everywhere, it had better be as small as possible, as light as possible, and have the longest possible battery life. If you’re carrying it everywhere, you’re not sitting at a desk, or even sitting in a chair and making a notebook computer into a desk, so the computer has to be something you can hold with 1 or 2 hands and operate with 100% effectiveness.

If you think of wireless Internet as surf, iPad is the surfboard.

PC’s were not standalone devices. They are wired networking devices — Ethernet devices. PC’s are designed to work with the AC power and Ethernet jacks under a desk. iPad is designed to work with Wi-Fi and cellular networks, with no access to AC power.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=7941978 Nathaniel Tucker

And yet, the ‘agrarians’ (developers of anything digital) will only increase in number. Whereas after consolidation of farms, there are barely any farmers left.

Anonymous

No. Completely wrong. The Windows PC has been shrinking for the past 3 years, and the Mac grows only 5–20% per year. iPad and iPhone grow almost 100% per year. Notice the iPad started outselling the Mac in iPads second quarter of release, when the Mac was already 26 years old.

There are only 1 billion Mac or Windows PC’s in the world at any one time. There are 7 billion people. 6 billion people were able to pass on Mac and Windows when it was the only option. In the car/truck analogy, when there were no cars, we had 1 billion trucks and 6 billion bicycles. Now that there are cars, the bicycle users are not going to suddenly want a truck.

Another analogy would be power drills. Most of the power drills in the world are tiny ones sold to consumers to keep and use in the home. They cannot pick a man up if they jam, they are made to be safe. A minority of the power drills in the world are used by professional tradespeople. When they jam, they can throw a man across the room. You have to have training to use them. Some people cannot even lift them. And they are way more expensive. The Mac is the pro drill, the iPad is the home drill.

You’re making the mistake of thinking iPad cannot be used for content creation. That is false. An SLR plugged into an iPad with Retina Display running iPhoto outclasses most Photoshop workstations for most photography-related tasks. The iPad has a higher-resolution display to see your high-res photos in context, the iPad has color management that Windows lacks, the iPad runs for 2–3 times longer on a charge, the iPad is as portable as the camera so the iPad comes with you on a shoot, and the iPad has a touchscreen with which you can make great selections directly on the photo, whereas with a Photoshop workstation requires you plug in an accessory tablet, which may or may not have a screen in it.

Most of the photo editing in the world is already being done on iPhone and iPad, not in Photoshop on a Mac. Instagram has more users than Photoshop. Photoshop will be used by people who do graphics professionally, which is what I do. One of the main things I do with Photoshop is write AppleScript workflows that enable Photoshop to run itself. If you can’t write code, you probably don’t need Photoshop at all. Another common thing I do with Photoshop is use my lifelong art skills to airbrush with a Wacom pen. If you can’t draw and paint then you probably don’t need Photoshop.

And even though I have a great Mac with graphics and video and music tools on it, I ALSO have an iPad. So there is no way the Mac or Windows PC outsells iPad long-term. iPad will start outselling all Windows PC’s put together in only a few more years.

Splat

I don’t like to squint at small screens. I lose small things and have fat fingers. And I like trucks.
http://twitter.com/arbuge Alex Bugeja

He may be right that people need a PC only one percent of the time (paraphrasing a bit here). I think it’s more like 10% myself, but in any case that’s enough to justify a PC purchase to many people if PC prices are low enough.

Anonymous

He said “1 in every x users” will need a traditional PC, not “1%.” It could be 1 in 5, 1 in 10, 1 in 50, 1 in 100. Nobody really knows yet. iPad is selling something like 8 times the Mac every quarter, but iPad is also growing faster than the Mac.

http://drawlabs.com drawcode

So what you are saying is tablets turned me into a truck driving honky? Tablets are great to consume but content still has to be made, goods must be shipped.

Anonymous

Steve Jobs never said anything about the Mac being obsolete. iPod did not make Mac obsolete. Neither does iPad. It just enables you to not have to be at a Mac to do stuff.

Notice that in 2000, most digital music was listened to on a Mac or Windows PC. The Mac is obviously overkill for listening to music. That is like going to a music studio to listen to a music album. Then in 2001, we got the iPod (Windows got it in 2003) and we could listen to music on the iPod all day long while using the Mac only part of that time, and using the Mac for much larger tasks.

In the same way that iPod took your music to go, iPad takes your apps to go. Whether you come back to a Mac is optional. Most users won’t (most users never had a Mac or Windows PC at all, only 1 billion total are ever in use) but some users definitely will.

Also, do not knock content creation on iPad, because you’ve already listened to music that was written and even produced on iPad, already read blog posts and books that were written on iPad, already seen movies that were written on iPad and then a rough cut shot and edited on iPad, a lot of the short video on the Web is shot and edited on iPad/iPhone, you’ve seen presentations that were made with Keynote on iPad, you’ve received documents and spreadsheets that were created on iPad. You can plug a pro SLR into iPad and organize and color correct them and publish them from iPhoto on the iPad. You can plug an Apogee MiC into iPad/iPhone and record studio quality vocals over multitrack music and audio in GarageBand. Sure, you probably take that GarageBand document to a Mac and open it in Logic for mixing, but the actual songwriting and music creation is done on iPad.

A dirty secret of computers is that you might see a giant, intricate, detailed Photoshop painting that is airbrushed with a Wacom tablet, but ask the artist what his process was and he or she will get out a pad of paper with 25 sketches on it, and only one of them eventually got scanned into the Mac, opened in Photoshop, and then painted on. The “content creation” happened with pen and ink. Only the “production” happened on the Mac. That is how it is today with iPad and Mac. Many, many people are sketching or storyboarding or writing on an iPad and then once they have created something they like, they take it to a Mac and burn it into a song mix, an ePub or iBooks Author book, or work on it with Adobe Creative Suite and publish to Web or print. Or they integrate that work into an iOS app in Xcode and publish back to the iPad.

So it isn’t that a content creator replaces their Mac with an iPad. They keep the Mac and the iPad replaces pen and ink, or a camcorder, or a portable multitrack audio player.

The music stuff is probably the most advanced stuff on iPad. If you are familiar with all the various drum machines and samplers and synthesizers that have been made over the last few decades, many of them are now available on iPad. You run the app and the iPad morphs into that particular model of drum machine. In the same way you can create content on the original device, now you can create content on the virtual device on iPad, while on a plane, or wherever you are. And instead of needing to build an addition onto your house or studio for a large collection of drum machines and synthesizers, you have them all in your iPad. The same sounds, controls, algorithms are there. Plus you get batteries and much more local storage and Internet sharing. It’s MORE creative than the original devices.

http://cmars.github.com/ cmars

I live in Texas. Most of the vehicles on the road are trucks. My point being that there are subcultures and regions that will percive all this differently. I personally find tablets and phones read-mostly devices and I believe PCs will continue to be popular with those who create as much as they consume.

Now, if a device comes along that is *more* expressive than my keyboard and mouse, I’ll gladly trade my truck for a jetpack.

Anonymous

Not pickup trucks and SUV’s. That is not what Steve Jobs said. He said FARM trucks. He meant the one you load up with 100 chicken coops or a harvest of strawberries. Not the one you load up with groceries.
Walt French

(I’m glad I live near Berkeley, so that we got nudged to get a Prius that I thought too finicky to justify the cost, back when gas was $1.50 a gallon.)

Meanwhile, I do most of my computing on a laptop or my Windows desktop with multiple monitors. An iPad or my iPhone would be terrible replacements for either. But my iPhone is a wonderful tool when I’m out and about, checking schedules, news updates, etc, and my wife finds her iPad a far more suitable device for her Board work, for her Chinese language study, for reading the newspapers, for her email/facebook etc.

That’s the whole point. The mobile devices are suited to mobile lifestyles. They’re not for hauling bales of hay.

http://twitter.com/MauritzNordlund Mauritz Nordlund

Steve was a genius. I listened to a speech with him from 1981. He talked about how all computers will be connected. With “radio links”. WiFi/the “internet” didn’t exist then, but Steve saw it in his head. (yes. A version of the internet existed, but less then 0.01% of todays users know about it).

People seems to forget the computer dark ages. Between 1985–> 2001 nothing really happened. MSFT didn’t do anything. It was Apple and the insanely innovative Steve that changed everything. I could list over 100 innovation that moved the whole society forward.

The sad thing is: Who will innovate now with Steve gone?
Google? Samsung? MSFT?
We still haven’t got something unique from these companies.

Anonymous

Steve Jobs was no doubt a genius, but you have to remember, a big part of his genius was he surrounded himself with a huge number of more-specialized geniuses. He built Apple, and then Apple built the products. He gets all the credit in the world for building Apple, but he only gets partial credit for the products.

If you read the Steve Jobs biography, it is actually surprising how many things we take for granted were not done by Steve Jobs, or were against Steve Jobs wishes:

- the iPod scroll wheel was created by Phil Schiller
- Steve Jobs did not want to bring iTunes to Windows, which is what enabled the iPad to go truly mass market
- Steve Jobs wanted iPad to have an Intel chip

Steve Jobs modeled Apple after The Beatles. He said many times that you put a team of “A players” in a room and it’s more than the sum of its parts. Imagine if the Beatles were still together when John Lennon died — they would still be a great band. Any other band would love to have McCartney writing their songs, or would love to have only Harrison writing their songs.

> Who will innovate now with Steve gone?

Apple, duh. Steve is gone but Apple is not. Steve’s influence is also not gone. Neither are all of Apple’s amazing hardware and software assets. Neither are most of the geniuses who worked under Steve.

Notice that Mac OS X was a combination of Mac OS and NeXTSTEP. Companies that did not have Mac OS and NeXTSTEP could not make Mac OS X.

Notice that iPhone was a combination of Mac+iPod+iTunes. Companies that did not have a Mac or an iPod+iTunes were not able to make iPhone.

Notice that iPad is a combination of Mac+iPhone. Companies that did not have a Mac or an iPhone could not make iPad.

The next great innovative device is also likely to contain elements of previous devices in a new combination, plus some new technologies. And it will require a ton of design work, a ton of engineering work. Apple is setup best for all of that. Apple is designed to innovate.

Also, Apple takes 75% of the profits in their markets. A new innovation is unlikely to come from BlackBerry who are not profitable at all. Or from Samsung whose business model is fast-follower cloning. Or from Microsoft whose business model is also fast-follower cloning.

Marc Andreesen said recently that the way the computer industry works is Apple makes a new form factor, everybody else complains about it, and then everybody else copies it. Repeat. Most other companies are not even TRYING to innovate.

http://www.setfive.com/ Ashish Datta

I think its pretty obvious that we’re already living in the “post-PC”
era, although maybe its the opening act. It strikes me as a funny
obsession to dwell on the distinction though, the only people who should really be “afraid” of this disruption are the OEM manufacturers who aren’t adapting.

The computing landscape is unmistakably being redrawnand lets just hope it ends up being as open and democratic as it once was.

Anonymous

It’s more open than it ever was. You can tell because there are more people participating now. Many people who never considered buying a Mac or Windows PC have an iPad and iPhone today. And iOS has more apps in more categories than any previous operating system.

http://twitter.com/dotpeople dotpeople

A small number of apps are innovative and take advantage of iOS-native affordances. If they are priced high enough, their dev teams can sustain the ongoing evolution of the app and its integration with other iOS apps.

Many apps suffer from the iOS app business model where apps cost 1/10th the price of their Windows equivalents, with revenue often insufficient to sustain ongoing dev/support.

There is a growing pool of Zombie apps, which continue to be reported in Apple store counts. These numbers will eventually take their seat alongside dotcom eyeball and Facebook’s billion-user counts.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=538022315 Brett Bazant

yes but just because these toy entertainment devices are all over the place now, and that fact has changed the ‘market share’ numbers, it does not mean that PCs will not be the primary data processing tool available to professionals. Obviously they will. Tablets and phones with their high prices, underpowered processors, small amounts of memory, single tiny screens and horrendously poor input devices are not going to be used anytime soon for any serious computational task. Indeed, there are more PCs being sold than ever, from an absolute standpoint. Steve’s comment seems right from *his* perspective, *maybe*.. Personally, I would say a more accurate statement is “mobile devices are doing very little for us in terms of the serious uses we need computers for.They are special-purpose, entertainment-oriented devices which are pretty much irrelevant to actual computing.

Anonymous

No, you’re years behind.

iPad is a PC, not an entertainment device. You’re right, a Kindle Fire or Nexus 7 will not replace a Mac or Windows PC — that is because they are media players, like an iPod. However, an iPad can replace a Mac or Windows PC for most users, and for the rest, it can replace a Mac or Windows PC some or most of the time.

Not everybody is an office worker or business person. Even if a Mac or Windows PC is better for office work than iPad (questionable,) iPad is better for almost everything else (except coding.)

You can plug an SLR into iPad and edit RAW photos and publish them, and with a higher-res screen and touch input that outclasses a typical Mac or Windows PC for most users. You can plug a studio-quality microphone into iPad and record music. There are thousands of pro quality musical instruments. You can shoot and edit video on iPad, you even have the choice of the top 2 brands (Apple and Avid.) You can do all the things a Windows PC does and more (except coding.) You can attach a Bluetooth keyboard to iPad and write a book. Keynote on iPad is better than PowerPoint — users make better presentations in less time, and then present wirelessly from the iPad itself. You can do all this with no I-T help, no training, and a $50 iTunes gift card will pay for all the apps you need for a year or 2.

Notice that a $199 Android tablet is considered to be an expensive luxury, while a $329 iPad mini is considered to be very cheap. The reason for that is the Android tablet requires a $300 Windows notebook as well for most users, so that is $500 Android/Windows versus $329 iPad mini. And the iPad mini is better made, has longer battery life, is more reliable, is easier to use.

I consulted at an office recently where there was a user revolt against Windows 7. The users did not want to be upgraded from XP, they did not want to spend a week of downtime in Windows 7 training, and they did not want to have to spend weeks after that modifying their workflows accordingly. But many of them started bringing in their own iPads, and stopped using XP most of the time also. The Windows PC’s cost $1000 per year just in I-T support, plus more for Windows and Office upgrades, plus more for training, plus they use 35 times the AC power of an iPad per hour of use, and require more air conditioning. Yet the users were using iPad more than 50% of the time. So I really don’t believe you will find people chained to giant Windows PC’s in a few years in the typical office. I see the classic PC/phone on a desk being replaced by iPad/iPhone all the time. I think that will only continue. Being able to pull your primary workstation out of your purse anywhere you are, anytime, is a HUGE productivity gain. I can remember having to go into an office in 2008 or so in the middle of the night to use one of the computers there to solve an emergency problem. In 2011, I solved the same problem from an iPad while I was on a train between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, heading away from the office.
Walt French

@Brett Bazant wrote, “…these toy entertainment devices.”

Ha ha ha! Thanks for reminding us what the CEOs of Palm, BlackBerry, Motorola, Microsoft and others said back before Apple destroyed their businesses.

Yes, 3 of those businesses died because of their inability to recognize what became the dominant paradigm of the early 21st century. That is a bit more rapid a shift than anybody else is talking about on this thread. Microsoft, which continues to do yeoman’s work on the desktop, has many years of declining sales before it, too, enters the zombie zone, and watches its best engineering talent and execs hit the bricks.

No such luck for HP, Dell and all too many others, who have watched their sales and profitability sink into the swamp of non-innovation that any halfway competent engineer can do. IBM gets points for seeing the trend coming and exiting the business, focusing on higher-relevance work.

http://twitter.com/glencoates Glen Coates

As a founder who depends on the dominance of mobile to propel his startup forward, I am of course stoked.

As a pro desktop OS user who depends on the increasingly irrelevant OSX to build said startup, I am increasingly concerned about the dumbing down of a powerful professional desktop OS towards mobile UX paradigms.

Here’s hoping that Apple keeps the two worlds somewhat separate so we have the simplicity and the complexity where they each make sense.

Anonymous

OS X is not getting dumbed-down, that is absurd.

The Mac has always moved in the direction of less I-T work being required, faster workflow, less training required, better input devices. This is necessary because we run more apps today and those apps do a broader range of tasks. The user’s time and focus is even more precious today and the computer can afford to waste it even less. Doesn’t matter if you are Einstein himself, today you have 50 or more Mac apps, whereas in 1985 you had 6 or 7. Apps have to simplify their presentations and expose their functionality in more obvious ways because the user might use that app only once per week for 10 minutes. In the old days, you ran one main app all day, you could learn your way around even if it was convoluted.

LaunchPad belongs on OS X, same as Launcher belonged on OS 9. If there was no iOS, the changes to OS X recently would still be necessary. Mac App Store replaces CD/DVD software installs and insecure Web downloads. That is necessary.

I’m as advanced a Mac user as there is, and the few software developers whose apps I use who are not in the Mac App Store yet are going to get the boot pretty soon, because I simply do not have the time to muck around with serial numbers and activations and CD/DVD installs and apps pinging me independently at different times to approve an update. And when I get my next Mac, I’m going to install all the Mac App Store stuff quickly and easily and that will probably be it. Any other apps are going to have to really convince me they are worth the trouble.

OS X and iOS are separate for a timeless reason: most people don’t write code. Having code-writing available on your computer is really great if you write code, but having code-writing on your computer is a giant security risk if you do not. But even people who write code don’t need code-writing on their video player or book reader. If you write code, then it is obvious that OS X and iOS cannot merge. Tim Cook has said it again and again that they will work together better and better but not merge.

http://twitter.com/dotpeople dotpeople

People who write code and create content also consume content.

> Having code-writing available on your computer is really great if you write code, but having code-writing on your computer is a giant security risk if you do not.

On Intel, virtualization already provides strong security separation between code-writing OS instances and code-consuming OS instances. On ARM, support will arrive in the 2013-2014 timeframe.

More info: http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2012/09/how-is-qubes-os-different-from.html

http://twitter.com/dotpeople dotpeople

One solution to workflow separation is virtualization.

2013-2014 ARM CPUs will have hardware support for OS virtualization, i.e. separation of multiple OS instances on the same device.

Any of these combinations will be technically possible, though some will be blocked for business reasons:

* OS X, Windows, Android, Linux on Intel
* OS X, iOS, Android, WinRT, Linux on ARM

http://twitter.com/5partiate Miron Tewfik

TUI? Thats so 2007…
Anonymous

You need to define truck. Despite what it may be often called state side, I don’t consider an SUV to be a truck. Truck is the kind of thing used to haul freight.

Anonymous

Steve Jobs was clearly talking about farm trucks, not pickup trucks or SUV’s. A big truck with chicken coops on the back or a big box on the back holding a strawberry harvest.

Anonymous

I think you’re thinking a bit too specific here. The “PC” is becoming a (very) small device you carry around with you. You’ll simply use many connections. One set of connections will be your standard office PC setup: big monitor, keyboard, mouse, network, etc. Another connection will be touch screen reading tablet. Another will be small screen phone. Inputs will become things like Kinnect and Leap Motion and eventually eye motion or even thought. Screens will be … you get the point.

When you say PCs will be trucks, your right in theory, but I think wrong as a separate product.

Anonymous

In the context of the analogy, “PC” means “traditional Mac or Windows PC.” The analogy was made in 2010. Even now, many people refuse to admit iPad is also a PC. The PC you carry around with you 24/7 to match the wireless Internet you are soaking in is unquestionably an iPad or iPhone.

AnotherNewNameForDisqus

Meanwhile, back in reality – the business analysts in my office ask for three 19-27 inch screens so that they can see all of the Excel spreadsheets that they’re working on all day.

Anonymous

Business analysts are not representative of the general population.

And if your business analysts go to a meeting, do they take their 3 screens or do they show up with paper and pen, or hide behind a notebook that they can’t figure out how to attach to the Wi-Fi, and hunt for an AC jack because the battery is almost done? Because if so there will be somebody else in that meeting with an iPad who will own them and go on to drink their milkshake.

So just as much as a homemaker who has never used a computer needs an iPad, a business analyst whose computer is a giant 3 screen setup also needs an iPad.

In the car/truck analogy, even the truck drivers have a car in their driveway.

Stephen Alfris

In the car market we are seeing people (in many countries) move away from trucks to cars that look like trucks (compact SUV’s). These compact SUV’s (e.g. VW Tiguan and Mazda CX-5) satisfy the need for car practicality/efficiency while keeping that all important utility “feel”

I wonder if the same thing will happen with PC’s and Smartphones/Tablets etc.
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http://www.buraq-technologies.com/ ambreen11

Really true sayings. I agree with your post. Trucks are not good transformation but useful in the mode of ecosystem. Keep posting. Thanks
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sholaabidoye/ Shola Abidoye

This question that comes to mind is this. When people are in work mode – in the office, the home office, etc – will the PC become even more important when used for very specific (often high income producing) activities?
http://twitter.com/ChrisForment Christian Forment

“it’s that mobile devices are relegating PCs to special-purpose, mostly industrial devices” <- Perfect summary of the situation.The market longs to finally cut the umbilical to desktop and legacy systems but special-purpose computing (graphics, modeling & simulations, software dev, etc) keep the PC on life-support. Mobile tech as it works today, I believe, presents the evolution of the PC, not a new market. The mobile revolution has essentially had its first (few) birth pang the last 5 years. Mobile capability growth will ebb and flow over the next 5-10 years until the fully viable solution is presented, one that bridges mobilization with full desktop functionality. Auxiliary tech, such as semantic programming, increased cloud computing capabilities, and better mobile bandwidth utilization will help in spurring this development.
Adelle B.

when my friend told me that the book steve jobs nice and informative, I believe that many things that have not been finalized by steve jobs. he’s a hero technology.
http://twitter.com/prlambert Paul Roland Lambert

Here’s a video clip of this quote and a ballmer ‘response’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_Dlq4B56CI – very acutely shows the massive gulf in vision between them.

Chris Dixon