Tablets like the iPad are great for consuming information but what about creating? (Photo Credit: Apple, Inc.)
If there was one thing obvious at last week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it's that just about every company in the consumer electronics industry envies the success of Apple's iPad.
Tablet PCs have been around for more than a decade. But until Apple came out with its little iPad, they simply never gained any traction. Microsoft certainly tried with various versions of its Windows tablet editions, starting with a version based on Windows XP. And at last year's CES, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed off a prototype of a Windows "slate" PC from Hewlett-Packard that was supposed to be aimed at consumers, but when it finally emerged in October 2010, it was an enterprise device released with little fanfare. In the meantime, HP acquired Palm and is expected to announce its own line of consumer-oriented tablets later this year based on Palm's webOS.
Besides Apple, the biggest player in tablets is likely to be Google, whose Android operating system is being adopted to work on scores of new tablet devices. Even before the tablet-friendly "Honeycomb" version of Android was announced, several companies, including Samsung, began shipping tablets based on phone-centric versions of Android.
End of PC Era?
With all the hype about tablets, it's no wonder that many observers, including my San Jose Mercury News colleague Troy Wolverton, have observed that the reign of the PC may be ending. Even Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who owes much of his fortune to the Apple II and Mac PCs, declared the PC to no longer be a consumer device, saying last June that "PCs are going to be like trucks," and that most people won't need them.
Jobs might be right but I'm not sure that's something to celebrate. His analogy to trucks refers back to a time when most people made their living growing food or working in trades and had to haul around goods or tools. Most of today's workers can get by with cars.
Great for Consuming but not Producing
After using an iPad for several months, I'm convinced its a great device for consuming media but not great for producing it. Just as we have fewer farmers and craft people using trucks to haul their goods to market, we'll have fewer people producing documents, spreadsheets, reports, software, professional quality videos and other "goods" that require a PC with a keyboard, a powerful processor, lots of storage and plenty of input ports for accessories.
Is that a good thing? I don't think so, especially if tablets wind up replacing PCs in schools.
Teaching Kids to Program
Unlike the iPad, Apple's ultra-lite MacBook Air has a full-sized keyboard to create and program (Photo: Apple, Inc)
There was a time when kids were encouraged not just to use PCs but to program them using tools like Logo, Apple's own HyperCard or even HTML to build their programs and websites from scratch. I admit that blogging or even posting status updates to Facebook can be creative work, and there certainly are many examples of kids being extremely creative with their video cameras and cell phone camcorders. But there's more to creativity than posting a clever phrase on a social networking site or pointing a camera toward a funny or interesting scene.
When your only keyboard is a virtual one on glass, you're less inclined to write serious essays, stories or books. And though we are seeing an explosion in video creation, there is also the art of video editing. That can be done on a tablet with the right software but -- for now at least -- can be done more effectively on a more powerful PC.
Smartphones and laptops have created an enormous demand for applications or "apps," and that represents an opportunity to keep the art of programming alive. But in the vast majority of cases, the preferred hardware for creating these apps are PCs and Macs, not tablets and phones.
Of course we're not going to see a complete end to productivity. Just as there are still a significant number of people who buy trucks to haul produce, products and tools, there will continue to be professional programmers, writers, accountants, videographers and others with access to whatever tools they need to do their job. But I worry that this group, just like farmers and skilled craft people, will become a smaller and smaller segment of our population. And I'm especially worried that an increasing number of them will be working from outside the United States at lower wages.
I fear we are becoming a nation of technology consumers rather than creators. Whatever form factor we wind up having in the technology in our homes and schools, I want it to be useful for helping young people understand how to build, program and enhance the technology itself.
I give Steve Jobs a lot of credit for creating products that make it easy for the rest of us to consume technology. But I also want to make sure that our kids have the same opportunity as Job's one-time partner Steve Wozniak had to help create the technologies that they and their children will use.
This post is adapted from a column that appeared in the San Jose Mercury News
Follow Larry Magid on Twitter: www.twitter.com/larrymagid
Note by PC gaming I am referring not to casual browser games but full cpu/gpu monsters such as Fallout, Call of Duty and other popular console games.
1st i tried formattin' them alls but it wouldn't format "recovery" sos
i unpartioned them B4s tryin' ta install XP then tried ta format that but
but it told me it was leavin' 8MB unpartioned for th install & i ain't no expert but i've never seen THAT B4 & then computer told me that hard drive was divided in half sos nows i'm sicin'
drive scrubber on "em!
You may say the iPad is just a glorified web browser but look into the eyes of non-computer users that use a tablet to look information up and tell me that when they become interested in subjects they never heard of because they followed a link or entered a search term that that isn't creativity!
And how many people read news sites like Huffington Post with only an iPad! Remember, most of these people only use to read the local newspaper and watch network news on TV. Now they can come to sites like this and not only read the news but other peoples opinions and even share their own!
Oh, and for context I built my first computer (Altair) in 1977 and I did it because I saw one and had a creative spark...
For the first, it's plainly wrong. Tablets are many times more powerful than a PC of 20 years ago. People created a lot of things on PC's 20 years ago. People rendered 3D and edited videos on computers with CPU's hundreds of times slower than a tablets, with hundreds of time less RAM, and no 3D acceleration. I had an Amiga and did these things.
The keyboard thing? Well, I think it will remain for when it's needed. I expect most people will move to phones, actually, and simply dock them at home with a larger display and a keyboard. After all, they will provide all the processing power needed, including full HD display and video playback, so there's not much point in using a PC. In that I think that Jobs is right. Tablets will probably remain phone's overweight cousin.
As for writing creativity, do you think we need more writers? The internet and e-books opened the market to a huge number of bad and mediocre authors. There's never a lack of people who want to write. Even for edited, printed books there are so many that many of them sell very very few copies. I'm not really worried that any reduced convenience in writing will stop people from writing.
My iPad works really well with my bluetooth keyboard. I do with they (apple) would bet me connect up my magic trackpad at the same time....
I think creative people will still do what the've always done and find the tools that work well for them.
What the iPad has done (in my opinion) is give many people a new way to explore their interest in subjects they may have never know they were interested in.
The important thing is it can be used when, where and how people want without tying them down.
As far as creativity is concerned I am sure it has and will continue to ignite a creative spark in many many people in way maybe you and I cannot imagine.
Please remember that the device is rolling up to it's first year on the market and we are only beginning to see the radical changes its making in peoples lives!
You and I may be too old to notice, but ask anyone with an iPad and a small child about how they interact with the device. I predict that happens in the next few years will amaze everyone!