the big challenge is marketing the darn thing. but then apple are the kings of marketing, so they may really give it some momentum.
if apple can truly make the iPad the 'computer for the rest of us', they would have had the distinction of upending the computer industry twice in a row, first with the Mac and now this.
of course, it remains to be seen if they will be overtaken by fast followers like microsoft did to them the last time, negating their first mover advantage.
the ideal computer for those who are sick and tired of their computers rapidly getting bloated and slow, as all windows computers do. this one should remain fast and easy to deal with because it will only have the apps you need.
again i see the ghost of Unix. it's because macos and the iphone os are unix-baesd that they have been able to create a radical new user interface so quickly. look at microsoft -- they have to throw away windows mobile and start from scratch to create windows phone.
for my money, Unix was the greatest operating system ever invented. too bad for bell labs they made no money off of it. and to imagine, it was basically written by two guys in a small lab with a DEC PDP-11! hats off to thomson and ritchie.
3 comments:
Mr. Rajeev,
Despair not! Unix is making a BIG comeback in form of Ubuntu and other distros. Granted it has a miniscule market share but they are working hard to fix it and polish it.
It would take a lot of time to unshackle the "computing industry" but then MS has a stranglehold on the hardware industry. Apple doesn't work on anything else.
Ubuntu or any of the distros can be extensively hacked to work on almost ANYTHING. It's about time that Nokia is pushing for it's own version of Linux (Maemo)on mobile phones and by all accounts it's fantastic phone (Nokia N 900).
Apple iPhone and other assorted hardware are good for eye candy and maybe impress some chick. I prefer the industrial robustness of Linux which is rock stable.
Unix has evolved.
I happen to hate MS as well. But Unix is not the panacea you are making it to be. It is only thanks to Linux and software freedom movement that Linux is able to make inroads into computer users home.
Earlier Unix was as crappy as earlier Windows (3.1 e.g.)
The following link might be an amusing reading for Unix fans :
http://simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf
no, not quite. unix was always built on the principle of simplicity. and it was freely available to universities and so on. it was always available to tinker with, eg. BSD from berkeley was based on the unix code from bell labs.
the only thing that linus torvalds did was to create an open-source kernel. in fact, he gets too much credit, because of a lot of the non-kernel stuff comes from the free software foundation's gnu. the product should properly be called gnu-linux.
there is a huge difference with windows. it is a crappy monolithic os built to run on a single CPU. all the networking was an afterthought grafted on. unix from day one was written to a distributed networked OS.
what unix didn't have (as windows didn't either till 3.1) was a windowing user interface. you had to use a command line interface, which was fine for technical people but not for the public. anyway, we'll see if the ipad and suchlike will create a brand new touch-oriented user interface that makes the mouse/keyboard obsolete.
the real seminal invention was unix. what linux did was to create a distribution channel, by making the code free of AT&T and other cos' licensing. you have to give credit where it's due.
by the way, SCO recently lost the unix license case to Novell.
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