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IN FEBRUARY the cover of Finweek magazine carried a speculative story the editor very bravely allowed me to write. In the article I looked at an adaptation taking place in personal computing and centred it on the Apple iPad - a device only a handful of people had seen at the time.
Now that the iPad has been launched and more people have experienced it, I believe this movement has become more pronounced.
More people understand where things are going now because it's pretty obvious once you see the iPad in action. Simply put: computers are becoming appliances. The way we interact with them is also changing in significant ways.
Initial reports from iPad owners detail a device that is highly stable, doesn't give problems, has a battery that goes on and on and gets all the "computer" stuff out of the way so you can get on with your life.
And this is also what makes more technically-inclined people hate the iPad. They point to the lack of things like USB ports and SD card slots, Apple's restrictive policies for developers and other things the average computer doesn't know, and shouldn't have to.
One could draw a pretty obvious analogy with cars. When automobiles first became available, using one required a technical knowledge of what was happening under the bonnet (early cars didn't even have one). You had to be able to tweak things because in the beginning they weren't too good at getting from A to B without breaking down.
Innovation took hold, however, and soon cars became very complicated. But not for drivers. Automatic gearboxes, fuel injection and other technologies entered the fray and cars became simpler and more reliable for users while becoming increasingly complicated for mechanics.
Not just anyone could pop the bonnet and go crazy with a spanner any more. And mechanically-minded people hated the changes, while everyone else likes the fact that you can't fiddle enough to accidently break something.
Just like proper nerds hate the iPad - but their grandmothers will love it.
And unless your job is to take apart computers and put them together again, you'll appreciate the dead simple nature of the iPad. It's affordable and unlikely to give you any error messages.
You won't ever have to phone that annoying, know-it-all-geek friend of yours to fix the thing and you'll be able to do most of what you need to get done on it without assistance.
It's also personal - the kind of thing I expect to see on people's laps while they watch TV, or to become as common in coffee shops as a daily paper. The iPad, or something like it, is going to become ubiquitous in cosmopolitan life. And the same people who think you're stupid for driving an automatic car or listening to pop music will despise seeing it everywhere.
For the rest of us, this is the nature of device that will become a prerequisite for every member of the family. And don't even get me started on gaming - suffice it to say that Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft are in trouble, even if they don't fully realise it.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The iPad is just the beginning of a movement in computing. You are still going to need your laptop or desktop computer for serious work. The iPad is not something you could rely on solely just yet.
But it will enable you to do things you wouldn't do on your laptop and is surprisingly capable in its own right, especially if you use a physical keyboard with it.
Devices like the iPad are going to become a de facto media consumption platform - the first thing you pick up in the morning to get the day's news, and the last thing you put down at night after watching a TV show or reading a book. Comparing this to other tablet computers that have come before is missing the point in an embarrassing way, like comparing a Model T Ford to an Audi A5.
Computers are finally friendly. Steve Jobs has shown, again, why he deserves his title of "CEO of the decade" along with every cent of Apple's almost $220bn market cap - whether his critics like it or not.
- Fin24.com
