Today, I realised something curious. The way I consume content on computers has shifted significantly over the last decade, but the way I create content has barely changed at all.
On the consumption side, I now have my iPad and my iPhone and my Kindle. I can carry the web in my pocket, I can pinch and zoom and tap and stream my media while comfortably reclining on the sofa or at the beach, and do all this on devices with battery lives measured in days, not hours. The concept of “lifestyle computing” barely existed a decade ago. Now it’s the dominant form of computing.
When I want to make stuff, though, I open up a laptop that’s fundamentally the same as the one I used a decade ago. My MacBook Pro is lighter and faster and in every way better than my ridiculous old iBook, but it’s the product of a series of refinements as opposed to rethinkings. I then boot into Mac OS X (again, at 10.8, a more refined version of the original 10.0 I ran on my iBook in 2001) and open up the latest version of Photoshop or Illustrator or Word or Final Cut or Cinema 4D… all applications that rely on the same UI paradigms introduced in their version 1s in the mid-’90s or late ’80s. I could theoretically jump back a decade and work fairly comfortably (I’d probably swear a lot, but I could get the same work done, even if much more slowly).
It should be made clear that I’m not complaining. I love my MacBook, I love Mac OS X, and I love (most of) the applications I use. My workflow is pretty awesome. In fact, far from complaining, I actually can’t think of any significant way I could improve on my setup. Sure, you could make it a bit faster, increase the internal storage, and make my Thunderbolt Display a bit crisper, but I can’t think of any way to significantly change how I get stuff done.
So, what I’m simply curious about is this: in another decade, will I be creating on a refined version of my laptop, using a refined version of my applications and OS? How about in twenty years or fifty? Hardware keyboards have existed for well over a century and a half, so it seems pretty unlikely they’ll be superseded over the coming decades. The mouse and trackpad are fantastic user interface devices, and I find it pretty difficult to believe they’ll be replaced entirely by touch interfaces at the pro level. I find it difficult to believe that windowed operating systems (like ‘Classic’ Windows and Mac OS X) will be replaced by anything that looks or works significantly differently. Similarly, while Microsoft and Apple and Google are each attempting to abstract away the file system on their lifestyle computing devices, I can’t see how transitioning away from the existing hierarchical, folder-based file system would make life any easier for those with more complex needs.
Steve Jobs made the point in 2010 that Macs and PCs are like “trucks” – invaluable for intensive use, but overkill for most. He used this to suggest that Mac and PC innovation has stagnated as there’s now very little left to refine. (This attitude probably explains why Apple have shoved the Mac Pro into Limbo).
I think there’s a real possibility that the Mac/PC, as it currently exists, is virtually impossible to improve upon in any significant (as in: revolutionary, as opposed to evolutionary) sense, though I’m equally sure that anybody that’s even made that claim has ended up looking a fool over the long term.
I can see insane advances in lifestyle computing coming in the medium term (tiny, wearable computers, holographic screens, voice interaction, and so on), but I can’t see how any of these shifts will profoundly affect those who use computers as professional creation devices. I can see somebody in a hundred years getting up, brewing a coffee, and booting up a computer that I would recognise. No Minority Report stuff – just a guy or girl at a desk, moving a mouse, clicking a keyboard, and seeing their creation unfurl onscreen. For the most intensive stuff, this core setup seems extremely hard to beat, and I think it will still be hard to beat even in an age of augmented reality goggles and super-realistic haptic feedback devices.
What I wonder is… am I just not thinking hard enough? How could we fundamentally change what a Mac/PC is in order to make it a better truck? (And please don’t tell me the answer is the Surface Pro).
(I’m experimenting with using Designer News to host this discussion. Tweet me if you’d like an invite.)