You know you've used the iPad too long when...
The euphoria of owning an iPad lasts. No, really, when you're using it, you feel a connection - like owning a dragon or something, it's like.. and extension of you, like perhaps I'm part Borg, and have a low bandwidth connection to the collective..
Anyway, I've started to realize some things in my life that have changed, and only 4 days since I've gotten my iPad.
For starters, for the first time, I'm not as worried about being without a power connection nearby. I'm the kind of guy who ALWAYS has extra power cables for my laptops - if they're not plugged into the wall, they're not usable to me. I don't know why I'm like that, but hey, it's just the way I am. If I'm not getting all of the processor, I'm just not satisfied.
With my iPad, I've actually run my battery down to 65% and didn't sweat the current state of charge - even now I'm home and writing my blog, using my new Apple bluetooth keyboard, and my iPads just happily buzzing along at 84%. Nice. Almost amazing really. This thing is a total miser.
So, we're in our usual Monday meeting with my team, and our boss angles his 32" monitor our way to discuss some of the craziness that makes our jobs great, and as I'm sitting closest to his screen and leaning in to see, I actually caught myself reaching out to touch his screen to try and scroll it down! I mean, I didn't touch the boss's screen, but I did pause for a moment in the air, and then I retracted. As my co-workers looked at me curiously, I explained that I had just fought the urge to scroll Ben's screen downwards with my fingertip. The room roared. That moment, I realized, that the iPad has started to change me, and that things will never be the same.
I'm certain that it will be a strange trip, but I can't wait to see where it takes me.
I've always wondered what it would be like when our basic thoughts about how computing works would change, and I like where the iPad ios leading things - I mean, we've always used our computers and thought about how things were stored, and the design of the PC and the Mac all work with buckets - this bucket paradigm, as it were, is the basic concept of the computer as a device of different kinds of storage, and what we do fits into those buckets, and is ultimately, limited by them. Buckets of disk, buckets of RAM, offline buckets, Etc. PC users think of disks as drive letters - and what happens when there's more than 26 disk drives?
At least in the land of Linux (and Mac) the storage-centric bucket paradigm has been broken down a little - instead of buckets, we have mount points, all linked to the big bucket called /. But even so, people still work in folders, and have the inherent need to organize their stuff in folders, which further reinforces the presence of the bucket paradigm.
The need for these buckets was necessitated by the early computer designs that we all grew up with - of course, back when things were on the SS-50 bus the buckets were a lot smaller. Top end video cards come with more than a gigabyte of storage, and 28 years ago, the Atari 2600 video game system was dominating the home gaming market, and it had 127 bytes of video memory. And both of these systems, the new and old, live and die by the bucket paradigm.
I see a future where computer storage becomes ubiquitous with the computer itself. Is that far fetched? I think not - I think the iPad/iPod/iPhone is the best step away from that direction in a great many years. I mean, certainly, one can see the device itself as a bucket, but when it comes to the operational side of things, in an organizational point of view, all you're ever dealing with is just one bucket - and I think that in the bucket paradigm, the computer itself should be exempt, until cloud computing comes into the picture.
When I work on my iPad, I don't have to think about file locations, or cloud my mind with what kind of structure I'll need to solve this problem or that problem - all that concerns me is that I focus on what needs to be done, and I work on it and get it done. I find the freedom of not caring about what I'm doing or where I'm putting it, is something of a welcome release. I do certainly expect that at some point the computer might not be large enough, and I'm certain that I'll need to organize my stuff in folders, but I'm happy knowing that no application I can get won't run on my hardware. It's funny tyo say this now, but it's actual quite a relief to find that I don't have to deal
with hacking together my OS every time starting from an insecure please.
-- Post From My iPad
Anyway, I've started to realize some things in my life that have changed, and only 4 days since I've gotten my iPad.
For starters, for the first time, I'm not as worried about being without a power connection nearby. I'm the kind of guy who ALWAYS has extra power cables for my laptops - if they're not plugged into the wall, they're not usable to me. I don't know why I'm like that, but hey, it's just the way I am. If I'm not getting all of the processor, I'm just not satisfied.
With my iPad, I've actually run my battery down to 65% and didn't sweat the current state of charge - even now I'm home and writing my blog, using my new Apple bluetooth keyboard, and my iPads just happily buzzing along at 84%. Nice. Almost amazing really. This thing is a total miser.
So, we're in our usual Monday meeting with my team, and our boss angles his 32" monitor our way to discuss some of the craziness that makes our jobs great, and as I'm sitting closest to his screen and leaning in to see, I actually caught myself reaching out to touch his screen to try and scroll it down! I mean, I didn't touch the boss's screen, but I did pause for a moment in the air, and then I retracted. As my co-workers looked at me curiously, I explained that I had just fought the urge to scroll Ben's screen downwards with my fingertip. The room roared. That moment, I realized, that the iPad has started to change me, and that things will never be the same.
I'm certain that it will be a strange trip, but I can't wait to see where it takes me.
I've always wondered what it would be like when our basic thoughts about how computing works would change, and I like where the iPad ios leading things - I mean, we've always used our computers and thought about how things were stored, and the design of the PC and the Mac all work with buckets - this bucket paradigm, as it were, is the basic concept of the computer as a device of different kinds of storage, and what we do fits into those buckets, and is ultimately, limited by them. Buckets of disk, buckets of RAM, offline buckets, Etc. PC users think of disks as drive letters - and what happens when there's more than 26 disk drives?
At least in the land of Linux (and Mac) the storage-centric bucket paradigm has been broken down a little - instead of buckets, we have mount points, all linked to the big bucket called /. But even so, people still work in folders, and have the inherent need to organize their stuff in folders, which further reinforces the presence of the bucket paradigm.
The need for these buckets was necessitated by the early computer designs that we all grew up with - of course, back when things were on the SS-50 bus the buckets were a lot smaller. Top end video cards come with more than a gigabyte of storage, and 28 years ago, the Atari 2600 video game system was dominating the home gaming market, and it had 127 bytes of video memory. And both of these systems, the new and old, live and die by the bucket paradigm.
I see a future where computer storage becomes ubiquitous with the computer itself. Is that far fetched? I think not - I think the iPad/iPod/iPhone is the best step away from that direction in a great many years. I mean, certainly, one can see the device itself as a bucket, but when it comes to the operational side of things, in an organizational point of view, all you're ever dealing with is just one bucket - and I think that in the bucket paradigm, the computer itself should be exempt, until cloud computing comes into the picture.
When I work on my iPad, I don't have to think about file locations, or cloud my mind with what kind of structure I'll need to solve this problem or that problem - all that concerns me is that I focus on what needs to be done, and I work on it and get it done. I find the freedom of not caring about what I'm doing or where I'm putting it, is something of a welcome release. I do certainly expect that at some point the computer might not be large enough, and I'm certain that I'll need to organize my stuff in folders, but I'm happy knowing that no application I can get won't run on my hardware. It's funny tyo say this now, but it's actual quite a relief to find that I don't have to deal
with hacking together my OS every time starting from an insecure please.
-- Post From My iPad
Comments
As for the late adopters, I'll need some of them to come forward and say their piece - the one person I know who recently got one just managed to get theirs updated on the Apple 14-day plan, so he'll have the new one on the 11th. I recently used the same plan to upgrade my wife's MacBook Pro to the new Thunderbolt model, which I got her for Valentines day.