The single most notable phenomenological residue of spending a few hours with the iPad is what it does to my perception of the iPhone. The minute I picked up an iPhone back in 2007, other smartphones that had seemed remarkably capable (Treos, Blackberries) suddenly felt dated and limited. To my great surprise, the iPad does, for me, the same thing to the iPhone. Whereas before today the iPhone felt like a capable, if diminutive, computer, suitable for web browsing, email, composing text, and running all sorts of applications, it now seems more like, well, a phone. A phone that can do lots of cool things, to be sure, but nonetheless, my perception of its primary identity is no longer “computer that also makes calls” but simply “phone that runs some handy utilities.” As of today, when I picture the “thing from the future that I take with me to do almost everything I can do with a laptop except write code,” I picture an iPad, not an iPhone — until, of course, the inevitable release of the device that changes my perception of the iPad.

One my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, rendered in Lego (via Brick Brothers).

Blade Runner - Tears in Rain (in LEGO) from Zach Macias on Vimeo.

Fraser Speirs’ analysis of tech insiders’ negative reactions to the iPad is the best I’ve read so far.

The visigoths are at the gate of the city. They’re demanding access to software. they’re demanding to be in control of their own experience of information. They may not like our high art and culture, they may be really into OpenGL boob-jiggling apps and they may not always share our sense of aesthetics, but they are the people we have claimed to serve for 30 years whilst screwing them over in innumerable ways. There are also many, many more of them than us.

While Alex Payne is absolutely right that the iPad is not a tinkerer’s machine, I think it’s not only reasonable but long overdue that users who don’t want to have to tinker won’t be required to, or, more often, as Speirs notes, rely on regular visits from a technological shaman to keep their machines working.

Yes, the iPad is optimized for consuming media, but it’s no more of a sinister inducement to consumption than a book is. The idea that a single, complex, general-purpose tool (the “computer”) has to serve so many different purposes and audiences through a single hardware interface is merely an artifact of the history of computing. It’s crazy to insist that in 2010 my mother should use the exact same tool to send email and view photos that I use to develop software.

That said, as a tinkerer myself, the prospect of a future where someone who does want to tinker is actually prohibited from doing so worries me as much as it does Payne. The fight for greater openness on the platform is justified. It feels to me like this decade’s analog to the battle over DRM in music, except in this case Apple is the RIAA. They’ll eventually open the platform, or they’ll be routed around. And I’ll be happy to tinker for the cause.

UPDATE: See Roger’s comment below for a reference to Steven Frank’s excellent piece on this very issue.

Fellow Old Worlders, I hate to tell you this: we are a minority. The question is not “will the desktop metaphor go away?” The question is “why has it taken this long for the desktop metaphor to go away?”

Exactly.

As we bid ambivalent riddance to 2009, let us take care not to get trampled by the many impending surges of 2010. And for those of us who love small-to-medium-sized glowing objects, an insightful pre-analysis from Gruber on the mythical tablet/slate/unicorn to come.

It’s a hell of a thing to find one’s president on the front page of the Financial Times (above the fold, no less) kicking ass in the manner of something written and directed by Melvin Van Peebles and John Woo. I’m impressed.

My gut instinct is that if they could have given the Nobel Prize to the American people for electing somebody other than George W. Bush, they would’ve done so.
— Stewart M. Patrick

It was 1984, and we didn’t care. We burst out of the preview screening of Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo into the crazy streets. The energy poured off the walls and into our brains like the United Colors. We were high on paint, spray paint, and we thought we’d live forever…

Oops, sorry. That picture isn’t of spontaneous and illicit street art from the 80s at all; it’s a picture of a very earnest photo shoot on Stillman Street from just last week. Microsoft appears set to launch yet another lovably tone-deaf and embarrassing campaign touting, I assume, the ineluctable hipness and freshness of Windows 7.

And if you look closely, you can see that all the black folk who were photoshopped out of other Microsoft ads have generously been re-hired for this one, because it’s, you know, urban.

Damon Darlin’s elegy for serendipity perfectly captures what’s wrong with the state of “discovery” on the web and on mobile.

And there is just too much information. We can have thousands of people sending us suggestions each day — some useful, some not. We have to read them, sort them and act upon them. As we pay for them with our time, the human need for surprise presents an opportunity for new businesses. Can someone sort the information and provide the relevant thoughts to the specific person who doesn’t yet know he needs it?

Yes, someone can. We’re working on it.

This morning I was looking for a reference to back up what I assumed was by now a commonplace, which is that the iPhone is the new cigarette (original credit for this assertion to @wendyrama). Google gave me nothing relevant (neither did Bing or Cuil for that matter, so much for decorrelation). So, for the next person looking for such a reference, here it is.

The iPhone is the new cigarette. That’s it. Simple as that. You can stop reading now if you get it.

For people who smoke, the cigarette is still the cigarette. For people who don’t, the iPhone does almost everything that cigarettes do.

1. The iPhone changes your brain chemistry. For better and for worse it makes you feel good and want more (mechanism of action be damned).
2. The iPhone gives you an excuse to step outside and fiddle with something when you feel like not working for fifteen minutes.
3. The iPhone gives you something to do in boring interstitial situations, like waiting in line at the store, or waiting for the bathroom, or waiting in line for the bathroom at the store.
4. The iPhone gives you something to do with your hands in awkward situations.
5. In really awkward situations the iPhone gives you a way to check out entirely (granted, that’s a slightly different type of cigarette).
6. When you’re using your iPhone in public, some people will think you look sophisticated. Others will think you’re annoying.

Come to think of it, even for people who smoke, the iPhone is the new cigarette. It gives you something to do while smoking.