Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.
That’s where Apple is taking computing. A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn’t need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.
That’s not to say there aren’t trade-offs involved. Car enthusiasts (and genuine experts like race car drivers) still drive cars with manual transmissions. They offer more control; they’re more efficient. But the vast majority of cars sold today are automatics. So too it’ll be with computers. Eventually, the vast majority will be like the iPad in terms of the degree to which the underlying computer is abstracted away. Manual computers, like the Mac and Windows PCs, will slowly shift from the standard to the niche, something of interest only to experts and enthusiasts and developers.
Valse Irritation d’après Nokia (via Gizmodo)
WOW do I wish these were real.
The best Golden Girls-related art you’ll see all day. Via TV Squad.
Decade in Review
As the decade draws to a close, I figured I’d recap some notable things that’ve happened to me since January 1, 2000:
- Graduated from college (May 2000)
- Moved to Los Angeles to start a job at News Digital Media (June 2000)
- Got married (July 2000)
- Got laid off in the dotcom fun* (Spring 2001)
- Got a job at FOX Broadcasting Company (Summer 2001)
- Moved to a new apartment (Spring 2002)
- Our first son was born (April 2002)
- Our second son was born (October 2003)
- Left FOX for a job at Yahoo (Summer 2004)
- Left Yahoo for a job at Ning (December 2005)
- Our third son was born (June 2006)
- Became a homeowner (Fall 2006)
- Temporarily avoided seeing Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (December 2009)
On the nerdier side:
- Threw away my 100-foot Ethernet cable in favor of connecting to the Internet wirelessly
- Watched my music and movie collection turn from plastic discs into files on a hard drive
- Stopped getting photos developed
- Stopped watching TV commercials
- Saw my cellphone transform from a voice-only device to a pocket computer that does everything short of granting wishes
Overall, a pretty intense decade.
*How great is it that this article was written by Jayson Blair!?
It’s a Clue VCR kind of Sunday.
