I'm not sure if this division makes sense. Are Android phones "Old World" or "New World"? They have an open development model, and yet have most of the attributes and advantages of a New World device: applications are sandboxed, no need for virus scanners, etc.
I think people are conflating Apple's locked-down restrictive policies with the OS design of iPhone and Android which prevent installing a bad app from breaking your device.
I'm not sure if this division makes sense. Are Android phones "Old World" or "New World"?
You're barking up the wrong tree.
a) It's not a real taxonomy. He's, in effect, making a prediction about the direction that computing is going -- towards prepackaged specific purposes away from general purpose. Think of it as a descriptive concept.
b) Even if it was a taxonomy, most of those are going to fail boundary conditions. Those things aren't mathematical sets. They're useful to talk about populations, and generally fail at boundary conditions. "North America" doesn't really exist because you can't decide if a particular Panamanian boulder is in it or not?
I think it's a valid point- we have this tiresome parade of articles claiming that the future by necessity is one in which we pay apple a toll, forever, and that open systems are dying.
Android is a counterpoint. So is the OLPC OS, for that matter. You can have an open, general purpose computer that's also turnkey in operation.
Some day someone will write a tool which can determine an application (eg, on Windows) is destructive, by recursing into its code and finding all file accesses. You could easily monitor ever application running and make sure it doesn't, eg, write to c:/Windows.
So there are other ways than requiring the hardware manufacturer to vet safe software at the expense of the rebels and tinkerers.
I believe the pieces in Windows are already in place to do this, you can restrict an application to only be able to write in a preset set of directories, etc. What they need is an set of standards for applications that makes this possible, and then for application installations to use that by default.
I think people are conflating Apple's locked-down restrictive policies with the OS design of iPhone and Android which prevent installing a bad app from breaking your device.