Lots of innovation has come from post-PC devices, including all of the development for these app stores and jail breaking. Playing with my iPhone 4S, especially Siri. I know this is the future.
Laptops will still be around for a long time, Microsoft's vision is confusing admittedly but I think not everyone needs a full computer. Those that do can have both or continue to use their computers.
I think having a lower barrier to entry is always good and think we have to let the way we build things evolve otherwise it goes against this whole ideology.
I understand, i'm talking about the way we interact with the device. Like when we saw the iPhone and really started to think about touch being a viable method of interaction between the user and device.
You can't code with Siri, what i'm saying is letting Siri and touch innovate for consumers won't stop innovation in products for power users.
The writer makes the wrong assumption that the current mobile devices (e.g. iPad) will never have the creation tools that the previous generations of computer have had. IMHO, it's only a matter of time. And in the same vein it's never been more accessible to build something better than what's out there and get it out to the public.
I think that may be a fairly safe assumption. The very form factor of the Ipad and tables in their current incarnation makes them poorly suited for most types of content creation.
However, among content producers tablets supplement rather than replace other form factors of computers for the time being.
Also, docking stations are likely to improve and become more common. A future tablet which would be more powerful than current generations with a solid docking station that would support a full keyboard, mouse and second monitor is a standard computer with the ability to undock it temporarily when not doing real content creation...
"The very form factor of the Ipad and tables in their current incarnation makes them poorly suited for most types of content creation."
Excuse me?
The Ipad and the tablets are excellent for content creations.
I created a program to analize the spectrum of voice in opengl, and multitouch is way more natural to manipulating thousands of things at the same time(realtime zoom, panning and selection). It feels like a highway for your mind not to be constrained by language(that is so slow).
If you program using blocks it is way faster and easier than using keyboard.
...look at the keys and then look at a computer keyboard.
teletypes used typewriter machines because people got used to it, and then people made programming for teletypes as it was the only possible input on these days.
It does not mean that it it the best input for a computer, far from it, you just have to redesign everything(as iphone did with the iphone) in the programming world too.
Of course, this takes work and good programmers are lazy.
I'm not. Just port a basic interpreter to iPad, or write Logo for iPad. No one begets the fact that computers come preassembled now and no one needs to learn how to solder to have a computer. Imagine a basic interpreter that DOESN'T lose everything you typed in when you turn off your computer.
The opportunities iPad enables far outweighs the cost of having to learn to program to use your computer. iPad will get more people using computers in more ways which while reducing the percentage of computer users who can program will vastly increase the overall number of programmers.
I agree that the device offers many opportunities. Nevertheless it's not just about porting some interpreter, you also have to deal with apple policy which is not that friendly to such ideas. See for example how Scratch was rejected last year: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/apple-scratch-app/.
Apple doesn't control the Internet, and while HTML5 has its own limitations, you could still probably port Logo to it, especially since Logo isn't all that complicated.
I think it's more meant to be "bulk of computers people use in general won't be traditional desktops/laptops" and less "desktops/laptops are going to be eradicated"
I think I will be like those old men who still rave about their vinyl records and would part with them. As long as Pc devices as we know them such as desktops and laptops are produced and supported by websites and apps I will use them. I believe there will always be a use for a more physical computing experience..
Meh. Unfounded fears. There will always be computers/desktops/laptops. Just because tablets and smartphones are ubiquitous doesn't mean that they won't exist.
People will always want huge monitors, and there will always be programmers. Granted, in 20 years it might not be someone sitting in front of 3 LCD screens, but it will be something.
Sure, but desktops and laptops are starting to become more and more like tablets and smartphones. Look at the changes that started in Lion, especially the Sandboxes. Look at what is in store for us with Windows 8. It seems to me that if things keep heading in the same direction, laptops will end up just as locked-down as tablets.
If you think that the market will never let it happen, realize that at least 80% of consumers only really use their computers for the web and/or for games. What do you use your smartphone for?
True, our kids won't grow up hacking the same systems we did, just like we didn't grow up hacking the same systems as our parents. But there is something basic to the human spirit that guarantees as long as this branch of the gene pool is still around, we'll still tinker and build and create. It's just that the blocks are constantly changing. Which keeps things interesting, and is a good thing.
Yes. The fact that all these useful sensors (touch, display, camera, location, attitude, wifi/3g) are integrated in one small, portable, and not-that-expensive device opens interesting new possibilities.
Think of the hobbyists who send their phone into space on a balloon.
Exactly. The end of the PC era doesn't give rise to the 'iPad era,' it gives rise to Ubiquitous computing, and Apple knows this.
The trajectory goes:
mainframe: one computer, many people
personal computer: one computer, one person
ubiquitous computing: many computers to many people
If anything, people are going to be programming the shit out of everything in the future, not pulling back.
Someone, somewhere will have to program all these wonderful gadgets.
While it is conceivable that all development will occur only inside big mega-corps, I somehow doubt it. People have a voracious appetite for new content.
Smart money is on the tools to create new stuff becoming more widespread, not less.
Yep, the more things change, the more they stay the same...
When I was a kid, you could but germanium diodes and ferrite core coils, and make yourself a crystal radio - it was _magic!_
But...
There was no way I could have gotten hold of something like an Arduino - probably not for _any_ sort of money, never mind the sort of budget kids birthday or Xmas presents run to...
The same with a lot of other stuff, I had to wait till my first paper round job to be able to save up enough money to buy the ~$200 (in 1982 dollars) radio control gear before I could build an rc plane. These days that's $24 or so delivered from China...
I remember playing with my fatyer's grandfathers predecessor to Meccano, stone building blocks with pressed steel girders. I suspect children today probably look on historical toys like lego with similar charm/disdain...
That's true, I have no worry that "the future" is going to be worse.
But that's long term, it doesn't mean that we don't want to avoid repeating the eras where this kind of tinkering was repressed or legislated against. Those eras slow down innovation and take wasted effort to recover from.
Just look at what happened on the web when all those tinkerers stopped having to break into the tools they wanted to use and could spend all their energy doing new things.
Legos, I should remind, are existing technology, which didn't exist in 2 centuries ago. And I am sure stones and sticks were precursors to the invention of Legos, and now Legos will be replaced with computers as a tinker device.
Your iPad has a browser. That browser runs HTML5 and JavaScript. That's the quick way to get to something programmable. If you want to get down and dirty, drop thirty bucks on an Arduino.
Personally, I think the post-PC era is going to be even more awesome.
I could program an Arduino with a pair of tweezers, son.
...
Seriously, I have no idea. I suppose Apple's too cool for USB ports, but maybe Wifi? That ups the cost of your Arduino setup, it's true, but still - there has to be something you can do to communicate between your iPad and your Arduino that doesn't involve a general-purpose machine in between.
There's now a blessed serial cable with a dock connector, and some form of an arduino programming environment on the iPad. The only drawback is that the cable is more expensive than the arduino.
The "post-PC era" is greatly exaggerated. It may eventually happen but only for those kinds of consumers who would have never bothered with LEGO anyways.
For hackers, the PC (or Mac) isn't going anywhere.
In other words, if everyone uses the iPad, who creates iPads and all the apps?
Let me preface this by stating that much I'm about to post, I've learned from my 18 month old boy.
Aside from the sentimentality of a parent watching his kid develop physical and mental abilities, it's a very interesting phenomenon watching the way the development occurs.
Kids basically learn one of two ways: imitation and exploration. Imitation being quite simple, so I'll move right on the exploration. Now, there's recently been a lot of discussion whether kids in America are being hampered by overprotective parents. I believe that notion is quite correct.
My son has legos, but he also has access to my touchpad and android phone. To him, they're not so different. Legos teach him that he can piece them together to make new things or break them apart for the components (creativity). The electronics teach him that there is a logical action and reaction (logic).
It's absolutely amazing the first time I saw his eyes light up because he figured out how to wake the device from sleep or how to unlock it. It's a physical indication that a neural connection has been made in his head. To me, that indicates these types of tools will indeed facilitate a much earlier exposure to logic we have not seen in previous generations.
So to come full circle, I don't think the death of legos (I don't really foresee it happening) will hamper our kids because there will be other mediums. As long as we don't hamper exploration, kids will develop both creativity and logic.
This. When my kid will be big enough I'll buy him toys he can break, like Legos, later I'll buy him gadgets he can break, like PCs, open garden tablets. If it results in him having to fiddle the os in order to bypass the antiporn barrier I'll setup, it will be all for the best.
My family didn't own a computer until after I had read my first programming book (I was in 2nd grade, the computer in my classroom fascinated me, and the public library had a book about BASIC.) Curiosity always finds a way.
There are multiple BASIC and Scheme interpreters in the App Store, as well as apps for writing HTML documents. If you want to write proper apps, an iOS developer certificate costs money, but so did Visual Basic back in the day, and on Android or a jailbroken iPhone it's free.
Post-PC devices are inherently bad for programming because they don't have proper keyboards, but by the same token you'll likely have access to a keyboarded computer to do homework on, at least until someone invents a new input method that's better for both. (Nuance dictation for code, anyone?)
Post-PC devices are inherently bad for programming because they don't have proper keyboards
I went on a road trip this summer and continued to do some programming while on it. I found the iPad to be more comfortable than my laptop when sitting in the passenger seat.
A keyboard is pretty hard to beat when you've got a desk in front of you, but when you are left in weird positions, the iPad actually isn't that bad for editing code.
Not sure if the Lego example is a good one. Lego has been available for over 60 years, and still going strong. According to his website, the OP is 18 years old. If his fears had any basis, then Lego would have disappeared way before he was born.
Another important point is that our experiences shape us in specific ways. Our kids' experiences will shape them differently. Having iPads does not make them any less inventive or curious. It's just that we can not imagine, today, what they will think of in the future.
There's a surprising amount of belief in historical determinism in the discussion here, which is utterly unjustified. It is easy to believe that the future will fix itself on its own. But such beliefs are mostly the result of not being able to imagine alternative histories in which things don't get to be so rosy.
The truth is that so many things in the history of computing were improbable, and made possible by a select few very strong-willed individuals. Personal computing was improbable. The dominance of open source was improbable. etc.
It's up to us to ensure that the post-PC era won't be the era of walled gardens, which is definitely where it's headed. And that would be perfectly fine, if our walled gardens weren't so darn suboptimal.
I grew up on Windows PCs, the barrier to entry for tinkering with apps on Windows was way higher than building things with iOS SDK or HTML. I am not worried at all about the children of tomorrow.
The author does sound like a retro-grouch. As I often say to hipsters on fixies, “For you it’s retro, for me it’s nostalgia.” That being said, the post-PC era does not mean that nobody has a PC, it means that people don’t have to buy PCs to do non-PC things. Imagine if you needed a PC to watch television. It’s the same thing with email, FB, and web browsing. Why do I want to know how to format a hard drive to read Hacker News?
Steve Jobs described PCs as being like pickup trucks, and he described post-PC devices as being like all the other vehicles people use, from bicycles to SUVs. None of those made the pickup truck go away, and for that matter there is a sizeable market of people who take pride in driving a pickup truck even though they never haul anything bigger or dirtier than a chest of drawers in it.
PCs will be the same way. Available and cheap if you need one, and also available for those just like the status symbol of being a touch guy who fdisks and bash scripts and thinks curl beats Firefox.
the post-PC era does not mean that nobody has a PC, it means that people don’t have to buy PCs to do non-PC things.
Fewer people needing to buy PCs to do non-PC things means fewer people buying PCs. Fewer people buying PCs means fewer people exposed to the PC things early on. Fewer people who are familiar with the things that you use to make things.
Well, suppose all you have is an iPad, and you want to write some code. Sad panda, yes?
Well, not necessarily.
Let's say you go plop down 50 bucks or whatever on a keyboard -- or maybe you don't because you have a bigger tolerance for trying to type code on an onscreen keyboard than I personally do.
Next, you have to locate yourself a web browser. And there's one right there on your iPad already, so you're done.
Next you have to find somewhere on the internet where you can do coding. Here's the first one I found from a quick Google search: http://www.coderun.com/ . It's a browser-based IDE for php or asp.net that allows you build, test, and deploy a website right from the comfort of your own browser. I'm sure there are other options out there, but I didn't look very hard.
So it doesn't seem like you're going to have to work very hard to find a way to learn to write code as long as the web browser doesn't go anywhere. Even on an iPad.
This is like telling me that it's lamentable that I can't fix a car. Had I been forced to spend many waking hours tuning and maintaining my car, I would have learned something.
Well, I spent those hours programming, and the people who love cars are using the time saved by their iPad to tinker ith internal combustion engines and electric vehicles.
Who's forcing whom to do anything? Why is having the option to do something such a bad thing? Windows gives its users plenty of opportunity to tinker. Most of them don't bother. With the ipad, however, the option itself is taken away.
We already have this era right now. It's called the "Our computer classes are typing and learning to use MS Office" era.
Nobody really learned how to do anything complex on the computer. CLI's are scary. Programming is hard.
As a result, most computer users, many of whom are very intelligent people who would easily be capable of basic programming and understanding unix pipes and similar are never are exposed to it, and thus it's a foreign language.
Don't blame the iPad. Blame GUI software and the illusion of ease hiding complexity for where we're at.
My first computer booted into a BASIC interpreter. That was pretty awesome, and gave me an early window into programming. On the other hand, it didn't have a lot of things. It didn't have a text editor. It didn't have anything other than a BASIC interpreter. I knew that the games I played on that machine weren't written in BASIC, but I didn't know where to go to learn how they were made.
My current computer, made by Apple, comes with interpreters for several languages, all more powerful than BASIC. It comes with text editors. And, best of all, it comes connected to an Internet from which I can not only download interpreters and compilers for all sorts of languages, but find extensive documentation on how to use them.
A child today has access to so much more in the way of programming tools than I did. We live in a glorious golden age of hobbyist programming.
I think the author's point is that the post-PC era implies that the golden age you're describing is dying, replaced with a clean future, wherein people don't have computers with text editors and that can run interpreters and compilers etc.
The children of the post-PC future will only have access to iPads. Or Kindle Fires, as pure a consumption device as I can imagine.
Nobody's gonna buy devices that let them create in those ways anymore? Surely there will be demand for things to be created in the forms that those devices aren't good at creating for.
But I think the author's point is that part of his penchant for making is due to exposure as a child. In a post-PC era, even if professionals still have PCs, many fewer people will than do today, because they won't need them. That means fewer people, fewer children will be exposed to them as the author was. I think it's a valid concern.
There may be fewer of these sitting around living rooms. But a greater proportion will be available to dual-boot as Dad won't be so worried about losing his TurboTax data.
The devices supplementing or supplanting them will give kids access to the entire library of human writing prior to 1900, plus an extraordinary ability to review art and musical history. They'll be one copyright violation away from K&R. They will essentially be dropped into the Library of Congress, with the Louvre and the Hermitage bolted on at one annex. In the basement will be the nightclubs of Harlem and the salons of Vienna. This is before anyone uses these things for anything _new_. And these contraptions are somehow _limiting_?
Nor will they remain closed. Proprietary tablet systems will suffer the same relentless competition that has grown $600 of desktop from pipe-dream to humdrum commodity. People and companies will code these things precisely to match the capabilities, and revenues, now locked away.
I get the philosophic distaste for closed systems. But haven't the past ten years demonstrated that, in a free market, they can't stay closed? Or that the revenues available to proprietary innovators can motivate accelerations in innovation? Worries about "closed" were one thing in 1995 when people thought they were doomed to Windows. Maybe it's time to adjust the anxieties for what we've seen of the long-term competitiveness of "open".
Plenty of people reference things like Apple's dominance of the tablet market and Apple's profitability compared to other device manufacturers and claim that "this time it's different". That may be famously wrong with respect to the stock market, but we have relatively few examples of the evolution and adoption of computing platforms so I'd say it is a much harder call here.
I suppose I (personally) think it's generally inevitable (and even mostly good!) that machines continue to evolve the way they are doing now - "good" primarily because the newer types of systems provide so much more creative power to non-engineering types, which make up the majority of people.
But, as someone who is deeply interested in computers today primarily because of the power that was available to me as a young child on an early PC, I think that one of the most noble goods that can be done for the future is to provide tools to allow future generations to have access to similar capabilities for exploration and design like we had. The most obvious way to do so seems to me to be "open Web" tools. Web stuff that lets kids play the way we did in BASIC (hopefully even better!) seems like a really good thing to me.
Well, one thing I worry about is the ability of hackers to continue to develop their own OS's and load them on machines. Surely big companies will need to continue to be able to do this but it's possible to imagine that that might be only able to be done with a contract with the hardware manufacturer in the future, which could destroy the ability of hackers to load their own OS's on machines. (i.e. custom os's is something that there might be insufficient demand for despite not being able to create them with future devices.)
Sorry, that part was hyperbolic. But it's true that what the author is describing is the end of precisely the golden age you desribe. To whatever degree consumption devices replace production devices, there will be less exposure to them.
It's not an insult. But consumption devices are lamentable as far as they replace production devices. I love books, and I don't sneer at children who read them. But I would like all children to have access and exposure to writing tools so they realize that they too make books.
Books are a horrible example of a consumption device, the printing press profoundly opened up the ability to write and distribute books and ideas.
Sure, the modern pace of life makes writing and printing a book seem difficult but at the time modern books were a fantastic democritization of the ability to produce literature and distribute ideas compared to the status quo of being illiterate and going to church to be read to by those with access to the books.
118 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadLaptops will still be around for a long time, Microsoft's vision is confusing admittedly but I think not everyone needs a full computer. Those that do can have both or continue to use their computers.
I think having a lower barrier to entry is always good and think we have to let the way we build things evolve otherwise it goes against this whole ideology.
You can't code with Siri, what i'm saying is letting Siri and touch innovate for consumers won't stop innovation in products for power users.
However, among content producers tablets supplement rather than replace other form factors of computers for the time being.
Also, docking stations are likely to improve and become more common. A future tablet which would be more powerful than current generations with a solid docking station that would support a full keyboard, mouse and second monitor is a standard computer with the ability to undock it temporarily when not doing real content creation...
Excuse me?
The Ipad and the tablets are excellent for content creations.
I created a program to analize the spectrum of voice in opengl, and multitouch is way more natural to manipulating thousands of things at the same time(realtime zoom, panning and selection). It feels like a highway for your mind not to be constrained by language(that is so slow).
If you program using blocks it is way faster and easier than using keyboard.
Do you really think that keyboard are so good for content creation, if you think so you need to look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sholes_typewriter.jpg
...look at the keys and then look at a computer keyboard.
teletypes used typewriter machines because people got used to it, and then people made programming for teletypes as it was the only possible input on these days.
It does not mean that it it the best input for a computer, far from it, you just have to redesign everything(as iphone did with the iphone) in the programming world too.
Of course, this takes work and good programmers are lazy.
The opportunities iPad enables far outweighs the cost of having to learn to program to use your computer. iPad will get more people using computers in more ways which while reducing the percentage of computer users who can program will vastly increase the overall number of programmers.
For more information, see Section 3.3.2 of the iOS App Store Review Guidelines, and the following posts on lua-list:
http://lua-list.2524044.n2.nabble.com/Ok-Apple-has-released-...
http://lua-list.2524044.n2.nabble.com/Lua-on-iOS-again-was-p...
http://lua-list.2524044.n2.nabble.com/iLuaBox-Now-Available-...
Also, s/begets/regrets/
People will always want huge monitors, and there will always be programmers. Granted, in 20 years it might not be someone sitting in front of 3 LCD screens, but it will be something.
If you think that the market will never let it happen, realize that at least 80% of consumers only really use their computers for the web and/or for games. What do you use your smartphone for?
Think of the hobbyists who send their phone into space on a balloon.
The trajectory goes: mainframe: one computer, many people personal computer: one computer, one person ubiquitous computing: many computers to many people
If anything, people are going to be programming the shit out of everything in the future, not pulling back.
Someone, somewhere will have to program all these wonderful gadgets.
While it is conceivable that all development will occur only inside big mega-corps, I somehow doubt it. People have a voracious appetite for new content.
Smart money is on the tools to create new stuff becoming more widespread, not less.
When I was a kid, you could but germanium diodes and ferrite core coils, and make yourself a crystal radio - it was _magic!_
But...
There was no way I could have gotten hold of something like an Arduino - probably not for _any_ sort of money, never mind the sort of budget kids birthday or Xmas presents run to...
The same with a lot of other stuff, I had to wait till my first paper round job to be able to save up enough money to buy the ~$200 (in 1982 dollars) radio control gear before I could build an rc plane. These days that's $24 or so delivered from China...
I remember playing with my fatyer's grandfathers predecessor to Meccano, stone building blocks with pressed steel girders. I suspect children today probably look on historical toys like lego with similar charm/disdain...
But that's long term, it doesn't mean that we don't want to avoid repeating the eras where this kind of tinkering was repressed or legislated against. Those eras slow down innovation and take wasted effort to recover from.
Just look at what happened on the web when all those tinkerers stopped having to break into the tools they wanted to use and could spend all their energy doing new things.
New things will be invented in terms of existing ideas or viewpoints, as Alan Kay likes to refer [1].
[1] - http://tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/
Legos, I should remind, are existing technology, which didn't exist in 2 centuries ago. And I am sure stones and sticks were precursors to the invention of Legos, and now Legos will be replaced with computers as a tinker device.
Personally, I think the post-PC era is going to be even more awesome.
But as an aside, can you program an Arduino if all you have is an iPad? Or would you have to go buy a general-purpose PC for somewhat more than $30?
...
Seriously, I have no idea. I suppose Apple's too cool for USB ports, but maybe Wifi? That ups the cost of your Arduino setup, it's true, but still - there has to be something you can do to communicate between your iPad and your Arduino that doesn't involve a general-purpose machine in between.
In other words, if everyone uses the iPad, who creates iPads and all the apps?
Aside from the sentimentality of a parent watching his kid develop physical and mental abilities, it's a very interesting phenomenon watching the way the development occurs.
Kids basically learn one of two ways: imitation and exploration. Imitation being quite simple, so I'll move right on the exploration. Now, there's recently been a lot of discussion whether kids in America are being hampered by overprotective parents. I believe that notion is quite correct.
My son has legos, but he also has access to my touchpad and android phone. To him, they're not so different. Legos teach him that he can piece them together to make new things or break them apart for the components (creativity). The electronics teach him that there is a logical action and reaction (logic).
It's absolutely amazing the first time I saw his eyes light up because he figured out how to wake the device from sleep or how to unlock it. It's a physical indication that a neural connection has been made in his head. To me, that indicates these types of tools will indeed facilitate a much earlier exposure to logic we have not seen in previous generations.
So to come full circle, I don't think the death of legos (I don't really foresee it happening) will hamper our kids because there will be other mediums. As long as we don't hamper exploration, kids will develop both creativity and logic.
Post-PC devices are inherently bad for programming because they don't have proper keyboards, but by the same token you'll likely have access to a keyboarded computer to do homework on, at least until someone invents a new input method that's better for both. (Nuance dictation for code, anyone?)
I went on a road trip this summer and continued to do some programming while on it. I found the iPad to be more comfortable than my laptop when sitting in the passenger seat.
A keyboard is pretty hard to beat when you've got a desk in front of you, but when you are left in weird positions, the iPad actually isn't that bad for editing code.
Another important point is that our experiences shape us in specific ways. Our kids' experiences will shape them differently. Having iPads does not make them any less inventive or curious. It's just that we can not imagine, today, what they will think of in the future.
There will be new and unexpected ways to create and tinker with technology. Don't give in to the "old man thinking", change is good.
Improved technology is good. Companies attempting to dictate how you're allowed to use that technology is bad.
The truth is that so many things in the history of computing were improbable, and made possible by a select few very strong-willed individuals. Personal computing was improbable. The dominance of open source was improbable. etc.
It's up to us to ensure that the post-PC era won't be the era of walled gardens, which is definitely where it's headed. And that would be perfectly fine, if our walled gardens weren't so darn suboptimal.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3335
Steve Jobs described PCs as being like pickup trucks, and he described post-PC devices as being like all the other vehicles people use, from bicycles to SUVs. None of those made the pickup truck go away, and for that matter there is a sizeable market of people who take pride in driving a pickup truck even though they never haul anything bigger or dirtier than a chest of drawers in it.
PCs will be the same way. Available and cheap if you need one, and also available for those just like the status symbol of being a touch guy who fdisks and bash scripts and thinks curl beats Firefox.
Fewer people needing to buy PCs to do non-PC things means fewer people buying PCs. Fewer people buying PCs means fewer people exposed to the PC things early on. Fewer people who are familiar with the things that you use to make things.
Seems reasonably lamentable to me.
Well, not necessarily.
Let's say you go plop down 50 bucks or whatever on a keyboard -- or maybe you don't because you have a bigger tolerance for trying to type code on an onscreen keyboard than I personally do.
Next, you have to locate yourself a web browser. And there's one right there on your iPad already, so you're done.
Next you have to find somewhere on the internet where you can do coding. Here's the first one I found from a quick Google search: http://www.coderun.com/ . It's a browser-based IDE for php or asp.net that allows you build, test, and deploy a website right from the comfort of your own browser. I'm sure there are other options out there, but I didn't look very hard.
So it doesn't seem like you're going to have to work very hard to find a way to learn to write code as long as the web browser doesn't go anywhere. Even on an iPad.
Well, I spent those hours programming, and the people who love cars are using the time saved by their iPad to tinker ith internal combustion engines and electric vehicles.
Nobody really learned how to do anything complex on the computer. CLI's are scary. Programming is hard.
As a result, most computer users, many of whom are very intelligent people who would easily be capable of basic programming and understanding unix pipes and similar are never are exposed to it, and thus it's a foreign language.
Don't blame the iPad. Blame GUI software and the illusion of ease hiding complexity for where we're at.
Don't be scared. Have fun! Make BASIC for the iPad or something silly like that.
My current computer, made by Apple, comes with interpreters for several languages, all more powerful than BASIC. It comes with text editors. And, best of all, it comes connected to an Internet from which I can not only download interpreters and compilers for all sorts of languages, but find extensive documentation on how to use them.
A child today has access to so much more in the way of programming tools than I did. We live in a glorious golden age of hobbyist programming.
The children of the post-PC future will only have access to iPads. Or Kindle Fires, as pure a consumption device as I can imagine.
But I think the author's point is that part of his penchant for making is due to exposure as a child. In a post-PC era, even if professionals still have PCs, many fewer people will than do today, because they won't need them. That means fewer people, fewer children will be exposed to them as the author was. I think it's a valid concern.
There may be fewer of these sitting around living rooms. But a greater proportion will be available to dual-boot as Dad won't be so worried about losing his TurboTax data.
The devices supplementing or supplanting them will give kids access to the entire library of human writing prior to 1900, plus an extraordinary ability to review art and musical history. They'll be one copyright violation away from K&R. They will essentially be dropped into the Library of Congress, with the Louvre and the Hermitage bolted on at one annex. In the basement will be the nightclubs of Harlem and the salons of Vienna. This is before anyone uses these things for anything _new_. And these contraptions are somehow _limiting_?
Nor will they remain closed. Proprietary tablet systems will suffer the same relentless competition that has grown $600 of desktop from pipe-dream to humdrum commodity. People and companies will code these things precisely to match the capabilities, and revenues, now locked away.
I get the philosophic distaste for closed systems. But haven't the past ten years demonstrated that, in a free market, they can't stay closed? Or that the revenues available to proprietary innovators can motivate accelerations in innovation? Worries about "closed" were one thing in 1995 when people thought they were doomed to Windows. Maybe it's time to adjust the anxieties for what we've seen of the long-term competitiveness of "open".
I suppose I (personally) think it's generally inevitable (and even mostly good!) that machines continue to evolve the way they are doing now - "good" primarily because the newer types of systems provide so much more creative power to non-engineering types, which make up the majority of people.
But, as someone who is deeply interested in computers today primarily because of the power that was available to me as a young child on an early PC, I think that one of the most noble goods that can be done for the future is to provide tools to allow future generations to have access to similar capabilities for exploration and design like we had. The most obvious way to do so seems to me to be "open Web" tools. Web stuff that lets kids play the way we did in BASIC (hopefully even better!) seems like a really good thing to me.
Why would you think that would happen?
And while I'm at it, why is "consumption device" an insult? Books are consumption devices. Nobody sneers at a child with a book.
It's not an insult. But consumption devices are lamentable as far as they replace production devices. I love books, and I don't sneer at children who read them. But I would like all children to have access and exposure to writing tools so they realize that they too make books.
Sure, the modern pace of life makes writing and printing a book seem difficult but at the time modern books were a fantastic democritization of the ability to produce literature and distribute ideas compared to the status quo of being illiterate and going to church to be read to by those with access to the books.