I'm idly waiting for the iPad Mini refresh that's probably not coming, the same way I was waiting for the iPod Touch refresh that never came and the iPod refresh that never came, as is my habit.
The iPad Mini, neglected black sheep of the lineup, is the purest and most honest expression of what an iPad is and what it's for: a small, incredibly portable computer for doing one thing at a time, where rough edges of computation are polished smooth and the interface falls away and disappears.
I've got one of those oddball 5th-gen iPods without the rear cameras, and even today it is the most incredible thing. A hair over 6mm thick, it's the thinnest thing Apple's ever made and the most ridiculous tiny/usable computer I've ever seen. I can still use it for video callss, and even (thank you, LetsEncrypt!) for the reasonably-safe Web, though iOS 9.x is long abandoned.
Even now, 12 years after it was released, it still feels like I'm holding a postcard from a better possible future.
Victor's disdain for the iPad is crystalline; Apple's recent ad is a distillate. I can't say how much Victor has shaped what I want from computing, but I'm certain he sees a human using an iPad the same way he sees a lizard in a pet store, a creature of untold potential pawing at a sheet of glass, baffled by arbitrary and cruel restrictions that it - that you - can see past, but can't reach past.
Myself, I don't think there's one model of computational interaction that's right, or not, but I definitely believe that championing any one model of computational interaction is no different than championing any one paradigm of computational modelling. It's a toolbox, and different tools offer different affordances and opportunities. But computing being what it is, these choices aren't in any way abstract, or disjoint from reality. All our choices are about power, policy, and possible futures.
If you're of an aspirational computing bent, here are two papers that are each a difficult read on their own, and together are enough to reduce you to tears.
The first is Doug Engelbart laying out his vision for augmented cognition:
@mhoye I read a while ago that perhaps the reason retrocomputing has taken off so much in recent years is that it takes us back to a more innocent time, when we could all still imagine computing as personal empowerment rather than bleak people-farming, dehumanization and surveillance feudalism.
But perhaps what we should be thinking about is less retrocomputing and more retrofuturistic computing. What would a 2024 Oberon successor be like?
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