Tag: computers

Answering a 9 year old question

I wrote this post in August of 2017 on the growing adoption of smart home devices (Alexa, Google Home, etc.). And now I’m using Wispr Flow to make this post from my iPhone (which looks roughly the same as one from 2017 but has changed so much) and I find myself using voice much more than fingers to do my work of writing.

There will be a combination of voice AND augmented reality AND artificial intelligence that will power how we communicate with ourselves, our homes, our environments, and the people we love (and perhaps don’t love). In twenty years, will my young son be typing onto a keyboard in the same way I’m doing to compose this post? In ten years, will my 10-year-old daughter be typing onto a keyboard to do her job or express herself?

Voice Isn’t the Next Big Platform

My now 18 year old daughter does lots of voice transcription and my 10 year old son has no idea how to type on a keyboard (granted, most of that is bc of our parenting choices around screens and devices and his Montessori education).

Fun to dig up old questions and see where they land a few years later.

Renting Your Next Computer?? (Or Why It’s Hard to Be Optimistic About Tech Now)

It’s not as far-fetched as it may sound to many of us who have owned our own computer hardware for years (going back to the 1980’s for me)… the price of RAM and soon the price of SSD’s are skyrocketing because of the demands of artificial intelligence, and that’s already having implications for the pricing of personal computers.

So, could Bezos and other tech leaders’ dreams of us being locked into subscription-based models for computing come true? I think there’s a good possibility, given that our society has been slow-boiled to accept subscriptions for everything from our music listening and playlists (Spotify) to software (Office, Adobe, and now Apple’s iWork Suite, etc.) to cars (want more horsepower in your Audi? That’s a subscription).

To me, it’s a far cry from my high school days, when I would pore over computer magazines to read about the latest Pentium chips and figure out how much RAM I could order for my next computer build to fit my meager budget. But we’ve long been using machines with glued-down chips and encouraging corporations to add to the immense e-waste problem with our impenetrable iPhones, MacBooks, and Thinkpads.

And let’s face it, the personal computer model has faded in importance over the last 15 years with the introduction of the iPhone and iPads and similar smartphones, as we can binge all the Netflix, TikTok, and Instagram reels (do we use personal computers for much else these days?) we want right from those devices.

Subscription computers and a return to the terminal model of VAX machines (PDF from 1987), as I used in college to check email, seem dystopian, but now that we’ve subscriptionized our art and music, it’s just a shout away.

Jeff Bezos said the quiet part out loud — hopes that you’ll give up your PC to rent one from the cloud | Windows Central:

So, what prediction did Bezos make back then, that seems particularly poignant right now? Bezos thinks that local PC hardware is antiquated, and that the future will revolve around cloud computing scenarios, where you rent your compute from companies like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

Bezos told an anecdote about visiting a historical brewery to emphasize his point. He said that the hundreds-year old brewery had a museum celebrating its heritage, and had an exhibit for a 100-year old electric generator they used before national power grids were a thing. Bezos said he saw this generator in the same way he sees local computing solutions today — inferring on hopes that users will move away from local hardware to rented, always-online cloud-based solutions offered by Amazon and other similar companies.

“touch instead of keyboards”

I think people who grew up with keyboards and mice will never be changed, but I think kids born within the past few years, who are growing up using touchscreen phones and tablets, will probably be the first generation to model their computing usage around touch instead of keyboards. We older folks just assume that word processing and spreadsheets are the computing model that will be here forever, but I think computing history indicates the status quo can drastically shift quickly.

I’d add Voice as a major input factor over keyboards in the next generation / decade as well, but this is a spot on comment.

via Reddit – iPad