Apple has, ironically, always been something of a throwback in terms of its hermetic design/development methodology. It’s rather like those companies that manufacture high performance sportscars or ‘supercars’, producing these cutting-edge machines yet their development and manufacturing process goes right back to the era of ‘coachworks’ at the start of the 20th century. Apple still makes personal computers like its the early 1980s. While most of the industry is into design by mostly off-the-shelf systems integration, Apple will push the envelope in terms of having exclusive components developed to fit their trend/standard-divergent designs because it assumes it leads everyone else as to where the evolution of personal computing is going. Usually, it’s right. Sometimes it’s way off the mark because, in it’s hubristic assumption that it leads everyone, it doesn’t always pay attention to what’s going on in the world outside the Cupertino cloisters.

The original software openness of Apple was based on convenience. At the early part of the personal computer revolution, software development lagged terribly behind hardware development -it still does- and the relatively small companies breaking into this field had limited resources to spend on application development. It was in their interests to turn as many end-users into developers as possible in order to cultivate a market for their products by cultivating a pool of third party applications that would give them an edge over less open companies like IBM that had traditionally ‘owned’ all their key applications and had no hope of competitively diversifying their application family single-handedly. Back in the 80s, it was as if Apple -or at least its exceptionally enthusiastic and idealist user culture- had practically invented the concept of freeware. But as the personal computer industry matured and software development matured into an industry dominated by big companies it became progressively harder to be an independent developer. Across the industry, software tools became increasingly expensive and complex and access to increasingly exclusive APIs more costly and restrictive. This is not a recent phenomenon nor in any way exclusive to Apple. It’s common for many mature industries -rooted in the compulsion to monopoly- to seek to lock-up knowledge and suppress the emergence of potential competitors -even if the inevitable result of this is Detroit. Profit doesn’t need progress. It just needs market share. In a mature market, innovation is only a tool for stealing market share from others -but suppressing innovation to maintain market share is an easier strategy for the large company. But is that really what the progressive locking-up of Apple products is about?

Apple has long acted like it -or the Mac- was in competition with the PC platform just like in the olden days of the personal computer -which is sort of like how North Koreans think they are at war with Capitalism when Capitalism couldn’t care less. But in recent years, as the company has shifted to increasingly blobject-like personal computer products that have no standardized architecture even across their own product lines, it seems as if a different computing paradigm has been emerging in the company. There is no definitive Mac hardware platform anymore. There is only Mac OS; a software/user interface platform. And now there’s an iPhone OS platform in some ways in direct competition with the Mac OS. There’s a different logic from that of the past underlying all this and it wasn’t quite clear to me what this was until the iPad appeared. That design seems to have condensed this paradigm into a single physical form. What the design of the iPad seems to be saying is that hardware platforms don’t matter anymore because the Internet is now the dominant overriding platform. Personal computers are redundant. We need only appliances that provide a front-end for the Internet. So it doesn’t matter that we lock up the hardware or even the system environment because it’s all about the content on-line and and user experience we craft with our means of delivering it -through appliances. Now, thanks to their hermetic development culture, it looks like Apple may be taking this thinking too far too soon for a computing culture that’s still talking about OSes like they matter. But here’s the key point; the iPad is NOT a personal computer. Any comparison of it to a personal computer -like all the knee-jerk comparisons to netbooks- makes no sense. What it is is very plainly stated in its name ‘i’ ‘Pad’ -at least for those who know their computer science. A Personal Access Device for the Internet. The PAD concept originates in the realm of Ubiquitous Computing which is based on the notion that a personal computer is no specific collection of hardware but rather exists as a ‘personal domain’ on a network which we link to through PADs wherever there’s some kind of network connectivity.

This parallels a concept called the Distributed Computer that I’ve been talking about for, at least, the past decade and a half. (and which can been seen in more detail here; http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Aquarian_Digital_Infrastructure) I have long predicted that the future of the personal computer would be that it would, in terms of hardware, break apart and become a free-form collection of self-contained network appliances of largely generic interoperability and that what we now think of as a personal computer would become instead a personal domain existing distributed across these devices and across the collective network. It would be as if you replaced motherboards with the Internet and, instead of the digital Swiss Army Knives that we call computers today, the computer hardware we own would be reduced to a collection of specialized devices; storage servers, processing servers, network interface units, and PADs in a vast assortment of forms (from worn devices like BlueTooth headsets, to laptop-like devices, to tablets in an endless number of sizes from cell-phone-like to TV-like, to robots and toys) all specialized for different ergonomic modes of use and different ranges of applications. Some PADs might be more PC-like -more like the digital Swiss Army Knives with more built-in self-contained capability and less specialization in ergonomics in order to accommodate situations of poor connectivity, like when you’re hiking in the woods out of reach of WiFi. But the more the net infrastructure spreads the less that is necessary and in the home these devices would be taking on very specific roles like a TV, a reading or drawing tablet, a writing workstation, a pocket PDA (phone, control panel, simple touch display), a touch-control panel on a fabber, or a CAVE (Cave Augmented Virtual Environment) immersive entertainment room. This specialization at the front-end becomes less difficult the more generic the architecture on the back-end and the more commodity-like that hardware becomes.

In such a computing environment, the openness of individual pieces of hardware matters less than the degree of interoperability they all share under a network platform and common user interface metaphor. But the question is, can you really achieve the latter without the former? And do we, at present, actually have the technology of interoperability on-line that this calls for? In design the iPad is PAD-like. But it’s still highly-dependent upon internal resources and on its means to function even when there’s no net connections. It’s still very much the Swiss Army Knife. There’s nothing else in the Apple product family that corresponds to the other hardware elements of the rest of the Distributed Computer -though the virtually defunct Mac Mini is the logical form-factor for that kind of hardware. (they have recently introduced a Mac Mini configured as a DVD-less dedicated Snow Leopard server -that’s very close to a generic processor unit) So it’s sort of like Apple is assuming that, for the time-being and for the apparent majority of people who’s computing needs aren’t all that sophisticated, the Internet as a whole is robust enough to function like a cloud computing environment without a specific cloud platform and the role of the PAD can be focused on, essentially, that of a hardware browser. Is this is a viable assumption? We’ll have to see. There seems to be a lot more to this design experiment than most people are cognizant of.

Eric Hunting
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