The Third Revolution
First Mac, then iPhone, now iPad: Apple’s ongoing effort to simplify computing
By Dan Moren
A few years ago, I took my MacBook into an Apple Store to get it serviced. The two Geniuses there looked it over with the same critical eye that car enthusiasts might give to a hot rod. ‘Look,’ said one, ‘he’s replaced the battery monitor in the menu bar. And he’s got the Dock down in the bottom right of the screen.’
Techies wear their tweaks and optimizations as badges of honor. But something strange happened after I watched Steve Jobs introduce the iPad. I looked at all those little inscrutable icons in my MacBook’s menu bar and saw them for what they were: hacks and shortcuts to ‘fix’ the way the computer worked. ‘Surely,’ I thought, ‘there must be a better way.’
Removing the Buttons
In 1984, Apple introduced the Mac and first brought a graphical user interface to the masses. ‘Look,’ Apple said, ‘computers are powerful, useful tools, but they’re clumsy and inelegant. Let us show you a better way.’ Of course, the Mac was derided as a toy by those who had grown accustomed to typing their instructions at a command line.
But look where we are now: Every subsequent personal computer operating system has followed the Mac’s example. Twenty-six years later, we’re all interacting with our computers with a cursordriven interface in which we point, click, and drag.
But as good as the Mac interface is, Apple realized that it isn’t good enough. While PC makers have been adding extra buttons and controls to try to give users more ways to tell their computers what to do, Apple has been headed in the opposite direction by removing the buttons.
A New Way of Doing Things
The smartphone market gave Apple an opportunity to implement these ideas on a more compact canvas. Seventy-five million iPhones and iPod touches later, the touchscreen interface has become familiar; users have learned a new way of doing things.
But even now, the iPad is a bold, ambitious product. Like the iPhone, it abstracts the nitty-gritty details of a computer’s underpinnings and removes obstructions to the tasks you actually want to do. Much of the negative response to the iPad seems filled with anger (which, as Yoda pointed out, stems from fear). Much of that anger comes from power users who like dealing with the underpinnings of their computers. I don’t think Apple wants to kill off tinkerers’”it just wants to make sure that you don’t have to be a tinkerer to use a computer.
Making Computing Easier
Few people mourned the damage the personal computer dealt to the typewriter, and most of those who did were either a) fueled by nostalgia or b) people who made typewriters. Few people mourned the damage that e-mail and the Internet dealt to the fax machine’”in fact, we’re mostly just pretty ticked off that the fax machine is still persistently clinging to life at all. In both instances, people embraced the new technology because it was, well, better.
The iPad represents the next phase of computing. Apple isn’t the only one to realize it, either. What Google is doing with its Chrome OS is different than what Apple is doing with the iPad. But they’re both aimed at the same target: making computing easier for the average user. I wager that we’ll see a touchscreen tablet running Chrome OS within a year of the software’s release, though I am skeptical of how effective that combination will be.
The iPad won’t kill the computer any more than the graphical user interface did away with the command line. (It’s still there, remember?) But it is Apple’s way of saying, once again, that there’s a better way. Regardless of how many people buy the iPad, it’s not hard to look forward a few years and imagine a world where more and more people are interacting with technology in this new way. Even if it often seems to do just the opposite, the ultimate goal of technology has always been to make life easier.
Dan Moren edits the MacUser and iPhone Central blogs at Macworld.com. Contact him at dan_moren@macworld.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/dmoren.
