I’ve been thinking about what I wrote about beamdog the other day. Iphone store for the pc. It got me pondering what the 95% use-case for the pc really is. I have a friend (see his blog, acts_as_informative) who always claims apple does so well because they hit the 95% use-case really well and just let the others who aren’t in that use case just go do their own thing.
This makes sense, so I’ve been pondering what I think the perfect computer for the 95% really is.
- I think it’s managed, like the iphone. People never really break their iphones because they can only install trusted apps through the apple app store. Most people don’t need access to all sorts of crazy computery stuffs, they just need to have applications that work. Here enters beamdog on pc. I think the ipad is a very interesting device in this respect, but I don’t think it can replace a pc with keyboard… yet. The smart people at MS better be keeping their eyes on the ipad, because if they don’t they may very well find the paradigm of computing shifting out from under them and not be ready to move with it.
- I think it’s mobile. Laptops overtook desktops because once people buy laptops they hang out wherever they are. If I’m in the kitchen so is my laptop. Maybe my desktop is a wee bit faster, but aside from gaming it doesn’t do anything that my laptop won’t. I’m just never going to walk to another room to use it when I can use the laptop that’s with me. The laptop is still not a mobile device, I need to carry it around with me everywhere in a backpack. Computers in the future will fit in my pocket.
Now, imagine if apple just stuck a monitor output and a keyboard input on an iphone, then beefed the iphone up a wee bit so it was a little faster. I could have my computer everywhere, I wouldn’t worry about it getting a virus, and for most people it covers what they do with their computer namely:
- Music
- Communication via twitter, facebook, email
- Possibly some word processing if I’m in school. (Ok, not yet, but not far off)
- Watching movies/tv
- Sharing media (for example pictures, which I can… joyously even take with this device)
- Getting information from the internet like recipes or wikipedia use.
- Even better, with internet storage like dropbox I don’t even need a big hard drive so the small iphone hd is perfect
An iphone costs 200$ with plan. You might want 1-2 monitors around the house it could plug into if I wanted to do serious browsing for say another 300$ for 2 + 2 keyboards. 500$ is about the price of a current netbook. I think maybe this is what apple is trying to do with the ipad, but it misses the key point of being more mobile than my laptop and I’m still really not sold on an onscreen keyboard for all of my input, but it *does* plug into a keyboard. Just a few thoughts I thought I would puke up while waiting my turn to get on the computer I need in the lab.
Joel