

Wozniak: Tablet is the PC for 'normal people'  - alphadoggs
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/040411-wozniak-tablet-is-the-pc.html

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dkarl
My seventy-year-old dad still isn't at ease with Windows after fifteen years
of having Windows PCs at home, but he's a master of his iPad.

However, he still uses Windows for email and posting on the web, because he
hates typing on the touch screen. He tried the keyboard I got him for the
iPad, but it ended up gathering dust on a shelf somewhere. My dad might be
stuck in the pre-computer age, but he isn't stuck in the pre-keyboard age. He
knows what a decent keyboard is. The keyboard is one of those things that
people don't want to give up.

The folks talking about the iPad being the PC for "normal people" are looking
forward to a future where nobody except nerds uses a computer before the age
of eighteen. It's premature to speculate what a computer for "normal people"
ought to look like until the definition of "normal people" stabilizes.
Technological and economic development is changing the definition of normal
people every day.

~~~
edge17
To your point, Steve Jobs made a similar comment at D8 -

 _Jobs: “When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s
what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban
centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and
power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much
started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks.
They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value,
but they’re going to be used by one out of X people. … I think that we’re
embarked on that. Is the next step the iPad? Who knows? Will it happen next
year or five years from now or seven years from now? Who knows? But I think
we’re headed in that direction.”_

<http://d8.allthingsd.com/20100601/steve-jobs-session/>

~~~
davidhollander
Does _anyone_ bother to fact check on Hacker News?

The first cars were not trucks, they were carriages. And your 35 horsepower
Mercedes in the 1900s was not being bought by farmers but was being purchased
by wealthy urban dwellers. The word "truck" by itself did not even refer to a
motorized vehicle until the 1930s. Cars started out as a post-agrarian weakly
powered luxury good for passengers before they ever became heavy duty farm
implements, SJ's narrative is backwards.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck>

Step outside of the reality distortion zone, please.

~~~
TillE
This is a good point, but the condescension really doesn't help.

~~~
martythemaniak
Some of us appreciate bullshit-free communication.

------
jbigelow
I'm sorry but tablets being for "normal people" sounds out of touch. My dad is
a 58 year old fire fighter, he couldn't have been any less of a "computer
person" yet he emails, manages his iTunes/iPod, and can stalk me on Facebook
with ease (too much ease in fact when it comes to FB). And to top it off, he
has done all this on a.... Windows PC, I type that without a shred of irony
but many will read it as such.

Face it, ATMs mostly run a custom UI on top of a Windows kernel, Police
cruisers all have laptops attached to the dash, the US Postal Service will be
out of business sooner rather than later because email and by extension the PC
has been for "normal people" since the turn of the century. Anybody who hasn't
interfaced in someway or another with a PC (regardless of OS) at some semi-
regular interval over the last 10 years probably won't discover a need to now
just because of the increased portability of the tablet form factor.

~~~
bonch
So your dad knows how to use Outlook, iTunes, and Facebook. Can he install
applications? Update drivers? Install Windows security updates as they come
out and keep his anti-virus up to date? Tablets remove all that stupid
maintenance crap, and that's why they are PCs for normal people.

~~~
DarkShikari
Why does the fact that the input mechanism is a finger instead of a mouse
affect installation of applications, installing security updates, and updating
drivers?

These are two _completely independent_ factors.

There is nothing magical about a touch screen that instantly removes all the
complexity in an operating system: you're drawing false correlations. "This
tablet X is easier to install applications on than this computer Y. Therefore,
touch interfaces make installing applications easier."

~~~
bonch
I didn't imply at all that it was the touchscreen that makes tablets easier. I
thought by the examples I gave that it was clear I was talking about the
simplified paradigm of a typical tablet--a centralized store to purchase,
install, and update apps; a fullscreen, one-app-at-a-time interface; no
antivirus, antispyware, defraggers, registry cleaners, and so on; and a highly
mobile hardware device that comfortably rests in your lap and requires no
hookup or peripherals to run.

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photophotoplasm
I have trouble believing even "normal people" will want to use the tablet for
anything except casual use. The desktop computer's monitor/keyboard/mouse
setup is too efficient to be fully replaced by the touch screen.

Not saying that tablets won't find their own niche, but they aren't suited for
heavy workloads that increasingly large numbers of "normal people" need to do
on computers.

The biggest legacy of tablets is going to be how the ideas behind them
influence desktop computers. I'm expecting most consumer operating systems to
become more "appliance-like" and more tied to services provided by their
developers. The success of iOS makes it almost inevitable that this model will
be ported to the desktop.

~~~
jpravetz
Correct. I have two 'normal' people in this house, and neither of them could
or would get their work done on today's iPad. They are on Macs. For them, and
myself as IT support person, the most interesting feature of the iPad might be
the app management model and anything that makes maintaining the OS and
applications (not just 'apps'), plug-ins and other resources (eg. fonts)
easier.

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ThomPete
Yes it is and there is a very simple reason.

The tablet removes abstraction between the user and the interface elements to
be interacted with.

The engineers who invented the touch screen has done more for the field of
usability than any UX or usability expert could ever hope for.

Now the big question for me is. Will apple forget about the enterprise market?

~~~
dman
Completely agree. They do need to solve the text input problem though. I have
had to consciously reduce my usage of the ipad since it seems to put me in
read mode vs write mode.

~~~
buro9
There's less of a text input problem on the iPad than there is on a mobile
phone.

Since I've used smartphones with software keyboards I find myself in the habit
of replying only when I get home, the phone becoming little more than a
notification device.

At least on the iPad I respond a little.

I find myself seriously considering a blackberry again. I'd miss the software
but know my response rate whilst mobile would soar.

~~~
joebadmo
I actually find Swype on my android phone to be easier for text input than the
iPad. My wife also puts down the iPad and grabs her iPhone when it's time to
reply to emails. She doesn't like full ten finger typing on it and she can't
thumb type on it like on her phone.

~~~
glhaynes
For me, the iPad 2's Smart Cover's ability to prop it up makes all the
difference. I end up using it for lots more "laptop replacement" tasks because
it's so much easier to type on with the Cover folded back.

~~~
joebadmo
My wife has an iPad 1 with a similar case (Incase or Belkin, can't remember
which), but she still doesn't like typing on it. My theory is that it's partly
ergonomic, but partly a matter of expectations. A phone is a completely
different form factor, so you don't expect an experience that has any sort of
fidelity to using a physical keyboard (also the keys are closer together). On
an iPad-sized virtual keyboard, you hit a sort of uncanny valley, wherein it
feels like a bad version of what you're used to, instead of a totally
different thing. But that's pure conjecture.

The input thing is why I'm bearish on tablets in general. I like not just
having a physical keyboard because it's faster and feels better, but I also
like that there's a portion of my hardware that's dedicated to input. On an
abstract level I feel like it is a more egalitarian paradigm, to put _my_
ideas on the same starting level as everyone else's. It's like having upstream
and downstream parity. Maybe that's silly, but it's how I feel.

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brisance
This is entirely anecdotal and may not be representative of everyone else's
experience, but since the launch of iPhone and iPad, I have yet to receive a
frantic, middle-of-the-night-my-iOS-device-crashed call.

Sure, there are the odd hardware failures here and there (typically one of the
buttons is no longer responsive, or the touchscreen fails to register touches
in one part of the screen) but overall, it has been pretty stress-free for my
role as the "family tech support guy".

So yes, I would tend to agree the iPad might just be what the tech industry
needs to get more people interested in computing.

~~~
LordBodak
One concern I would have, with more people using iPads instead of computers,
is the middle of the night "I dropped my iPad and now it won't turn on, how do
I save my data?" call. Apple really needs to get on the ball with some sort of
backup that doesn't require plugging it into a PC.

~~~
bluekeybox
I imagine this is what their NC data center is for.

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michaelpinto
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook>

~~~
dvdhsu
Alan Kay, the one behind the Dynabook said:

>"When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I
said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end
of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth
criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and
you’ll rule the world."

[http://www.edibleapple.com/alan-kay-on-the-iphone-and-the-
ip...](http://www.edibleapple.com/alan-kay-on-the-iphone-and-the-ipad-sorta/)

------
drdaeman
Let's consider that "normal" people play games. Sure, there are gaming
consoles of all sorts, but this does not change a fact there are a lot of
games on PC. You can't effectively play - for example - 3DFPS on tablet. Well,
you could hook up keyboard and mouse, but there any difference from desktop
PC. Except for tablets have less powerful hardware than any typical "gaming"
PC.

Let's consider "normal" people work. Even throwing out possibly "non-normal"
jobs with high hardware resource demands (like photorealistic 3D graphic
artists, or CPU-intensive engineering calculations), but even a secretary
won't do any good on tablet. Touch screens are fine for tweeting, but are no
good for editing a sufficiently large document.

Inverview summarized: iPad advertisement, nothing to see there.

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MrFoof
I'm a nerd's nerd. After the dot-com bust I used to collect SGI, DEC and Sun
hardware. I cut my teeth on a Commodore 64 and also VAX VMS (in a DECNET
cluster). I built my own PCs from 1992 through 2007. I work currently as a
data warehousing consultant.

My primary computer at home is now an iPad 2.

Yes, I have a computer with a 27" display and tons of memory and four cores
and a GPU suitable for playing new games, but it doesn't matter much because
it's been collecting an awful lot of dust. As long as I can get my paws on
another one, my parents are getting one as a joint Mother's/Father's day gift,
because I doubt they'd touch their iMac much anymore.

 _"I think we'll need a new input method in the coming proliferation of touch
ui based devices."_ I don't. I type at 80-90% of the speed as a physical
keyboard. And the thing that slows me down is having to switch keyboard pages
for numbers and symbols -- otherwise I'm probably closer to 95% of my typing
sped. I bang out frighteningly long emails on an iPad with no loss of
efficiency. If it was bad, I wouldn't hesitate to go to my desk that's less
than twenty feet away. The only thing that solves the input problem is a
physically larger space for a larger virtual keyboard, and improvements to
autocompletion algorithms and dictionaries. And time -- aren't there people
who can type at furious rates on a Blackberry? There are, but they weren't
that fast on Day 1.

Can I program on an iPad? No. Actually, I can't do a lot of things on the
iPad, but all those things are what I consider "work" -- I don't do image
retouching to relax, nor do I relax by entering metadata for media, write
applications, nor model databases. For everything I do that I consider "play",
the iPad does all of it. Brilliantly.

Computers are for work. Tablets are for play. Most people's computing tasks
are in the latter category, and for that reason, tablets (or at least the
iPad) will succeed.

This isn't coming from a septuagenarian either -- I'm barely in my 30s.

~~~
Hominem
I am the same way. My iPad never leaves my sight. I even surf on it while I am
sitting in front of computer compiling code.

~~~
beej71
_sigh_ I guess I'll just never get it. I have an iPad sitting right here, but
I don't use it for a damn thing except testing.

I surf the web on a desktop computer--while it's compiling code, even--and
choose that experience 9 times out of 10 over surfing on the iPad (or any
tablet or phone for that matter).

Surely I'm not the only one who feels this way.

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asknemo
From my experience, most tablet users use the tablet for 1)videos 2)really
casual games 3)random browsing - not particularly PC-ish in my opinion. To say
'Tablet is the PC' is in some way less accurate than saying 'Tablet is the new
TV' or 'Tablet is the best mobile browser'.

~~~
arethuza
Exactly - I don't think having an iPad had changed the amount of time I spend
sitting in front of a desktop PC or laptop. But it has changed how I watch
video, read books and get my news over breakfast.

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rtaycher
Am I the only one who doubts a lot of the magical usability of touch
interfaces?

~~~
DarkShikari
Not at all. My own experience with iPhones and iPads has been awful, with the
touch recognition being finicky and the lack of force-feedback making it
nearly impossible to use.

The core problem boils down to the exact same reason why the Wii's interface
is terrible: it forces you to make much larger, slower motions -- motions that
can easily be misinterpreted and have very low accuracy -- instead of spending
0.05 seconds tapping a key or clicking a button.

Tablets are another fad like 3D movies. They're popular with a lot of people,
but in the end, they just give everyone pounding headaches.

The fact that the interface is a fat finger instead of a mouse does not
magically make the interface any easier to use. What mobile devices (not just
tablets) _have_ demonstrated is the power of simpler operating system user
interfaces -- not that touch screens magically make everything a million times
better. _This will be the primary legacy of tablets_ , not the touch screen.

~~~
gnaffle
Of course, not everyone seems to get pouding headaches from 3D movies, and not
everyone finds the touch interfaces finicky to the point of being impossible
to use. Extrapolating from your own experience to conclude they are a fad is a
bit shortsighted.

From my experience with iPhone/iPad, the people who "think" that the touch
interface required precise input are the ones that end up with lots of
spurious inputs, because they use very light and "careful" touches that are
misinterpreted instead of letting the input prediction do its work.

I do agree that there is a lot to be done regarding keyboard input, but even
the keyboards seems to work OK for most people.

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donnyg107
I think the ipad will only reach a point in which is has potential to push PCs
out of the market once it no longer needs to be tethered to a pc for regular
use.. Keyboards, size, and general interface are all this people acclimate to,
but only being able to move things to the ipad from a PC? You can't get around
the necessity for the PC there. When the ipad starts to feel more like its own
device, I could feasiblly see Wozniak and Jobs' vision becomming reality. But
till then, its a dependent device with a great UI.

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atirip
I find it hard to believe (me included) that anybody capable of having hacker
news account is qualified to discuss about "normal peoples" computer usage.

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TeMPOraL
What about out-of-the-office work applications? Storage rooms, hospitals,
factories, delivery - everywhere you have to walk around with information
instead of sitting by your desk.

I can imagine (I don't know if anyone actually tried this) a facility with
many (company-owned) tablets that people exchange between themselves instead
of paper reports and forms, much like PADDs in Star Trek.

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muhuk

        "We've never had an argument," he said. "We're just in
        different places, and we're different people." Jobs was
        interested in running a company, while Wozniak was and
        remains an engineer at heart.

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tybris
I guess normal people get bored with their "PC" quite easily.

