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To me the fundamental difference between a PC and a tablet is the software ecosystem: can you install any program/OS or must you install only those approved by

To me the fundamental difference between a PC and a tablet is the software ecosystem: can you install any program/OS or must you install only those approved by the platform owner; can programs access system resources liberally (including a shared storage namespace) or are they tightly sandboxed; how much of the underlying infrastructure is visible to and manipulable by the end user. Compared to this difference the question of whether the device has an integrated keyboard or not seems minor to me. Moving from a PC like ecosystem to a tablet like one is a net loss in my opinion. People are willing to absorb this loss and enter into a walled garden because right now building iPad-like hardware is not easy. I hope it doesn't continue to be so in the future.

jbigelow76 9y ago
Moving from a PC like ecosystem to a tablet like one is a net loss in my opinion. People are willing to absorb this loss and enter into a walled garden because right now building iPad-like hardware is not easy. Can you go more into why the difficulty of creating the hardware leads to willing adoption by users that most likely will never see "how the sausage is made"? I would think it would be the opposite (commodity hardware and easy app creation would lead to wider spread adoption by the hobbyist crowd). I think it will mostly boil down to what you grew up with. I'm 41, I came of age building my own PCs, getting excited about an OS (Win95), the tools of creation (the PC) differing from the tools of consumption (the smartphone/iPad). My son and daughter (3 and <1 yrs) will be exposed to PCs due to my job, but I bet a lot of their friends in daycare will see a tablet as "the way computing has been and always will be". (Honestly my kids may think that too, daddy just hasn't accepted how much of a dinosaur he is yet).
- yomritoyj 9y ago
  Just like in our generation there will be people in our kids' generation who will want to know how the sausage is made and it will be a tragedy if the only way to do so would be to grow up, join a big firm and sign a NDA. Even for the others, an open platform means a greater variety of software for end users. Creating toll gates on the way to software development or suppressing software which reduces the platform owners's profit is not good for end users. Many people who will never touch a command line still benefit because a Finnish computer science student could decide to start writing a PC operating system of his own and that OS now powers their phone or allows others to provide online services on servers that runs that OS. If building iPad clones with an open hardware specification like the PC's becomes possible for multiple vendors I'm sure we will see a software ecosystem that will easily beat the walled gardens. The problem is that currently the number of firms that can build the hardware is small enough that they find it in their self interest to use closed specifications.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Similar age group here. As you remember the PCs were the outliers, everyone else was mostly offering the same hardware/software integration as tablets. In fact Apple is the surviving company of those integration and most OEMs what to get back to it, because they hardly make any money nowadays just selling parts. Had it not been for Compaq and a failed lawsuit, building our own PCs would have been an alternative universe, which I never bothered to do anyway (was more expensive than buying a full new PC on my region).
- danaris 9y ago
  I'm not sure there's really a contradiction there: "the hobbyist crowd" is, and has always been, much smaller than the general population, so even with commodity hardware and easy app creation leading to widespread adoption within that subgroup, you can still have more people overall wanting, buying, and using something more like an iPad.
jrs95 9y ago
To me it seems like the traditional PC model has too many downsides in terms of cost to support applications from a developer perspective as well as inferior security in comparison to a more sandboxed model. For most users, a walled garden is better than an open software ecosystem. That being said, I think the best hope we have for an open ecosystem at this point is web applications. They don't have the same downsides as the traditional PC software model. The sandboxing you get with web apps may restrict some of the functionality you could get relative to traditional PC software, but IMO the security benefits are far more important. The risk here is that these all end up being tied to centralized cloud services owned by a handful of giant tech companies, and that's ultimately not as open as we'd like. But it's at least a significant improvement over the App Store model.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  A web site is running on someone else's hardware or running on your hardware but dependent upon others resources to operate. In theory you could open the websites sources but since the goal of app stores seems to be finding ways to monetize peoples data or get them to pay you monthly the end result will probably be unfriendly to tinkers, unfree, and closed. This generation will be poorer and dumber than the last.
- realusername 9y ago
  You can still have a sandboxed model with having the root user accessible, companies don't build that because they don't want the user to have any power on their machine but there's no technical limitation to do it.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    I don't know if it still is the case, but in the early OS X adoption days Apple forums were full of people asking how to just run as root. So....
    - realusername 9y ago
      Of course you will always have people to try to run things as root but the option could just be hidden like the developer options on Android with a big warning that enabling root might destroy their phone.
_ph_ 9y ago
As I am trying to put my iPad Pro 12.9 to more productive use, the single most limiting thing is, that the files application does not have access to all apps document storage. E.g. I cannot move a movie file from iCloud to the TV app or vice versa. Nor can I easily move other files from app to app. Nor can I copy files from and to external media connected via USB. Images are special cased as apps can access the photo library and you can drag and drop them, but real file access via the files app would be more flexible. Fixing this should be possible without a conceptual change of the app concept and would enhance the productive use immensely. As a developer of course there is the other big limitiation: the constraints of developing software on the iPad. For me, this is the main distinction between a device and a computer: the ability to program it. Due to the app store and its rules, iOS is a very secure and stable environment. This makes the iOS platform very attractive, and I think it was the right approach to start with a restricted environment and remove some restrictions over time. So I do think it makes sense to limit distribution of apps to the app store, but the restriction on what apps can do on the device should be reviewed, even if that blurs the lines to the app store. An environment like termux, which still could be completely sandboxed, would increase the usability of the iPad a lot. Or even, going completely crazy, a whole Linux VM in an app sandbox. On the other side, having a full blown IDE for creating and locally running iOS applications would be a huge step forward. The hardware itself leaves little wishes - except perhaps for a small overwork of the smart keyboard to have that additional row of function keys (less urgent) and of course the escape key. And little improvements of the ergonomics of the cursor and the return key. While the non-programmers users probably can live with the current layout, I am really surprised that Apple is ignoring the needs of any programmers so thoroughly.
- simonh 9y ago
  >On the other side, having a full blown IDE for creating and locally running iOS applications would be a huge step forward. Are you aware of iOS Dev environments such as Pythonista? It’s even possible to take a Pythonista app, copy it into an XCode template and release it on the App Store, though of course that has to go via a Mac.

jbigelow76 9y ago

Moving from a PC like ecosystem to a tablet like one is a net loss in my opinion. People are willing to absorb this loss and enter into a walled garden because right now building iPad-like hardware is not easy. Can you go more into why the difficulty of creating the hardware leads to willing adoption by users that most likely will never see "how the sausage is made"? I would think it would be the opposite (commodity hardware and easy app creation would lead to wider spread adoption by the hobbyist crowd). I think it will mostly boil down to what you grew up with. I'm 41, I came of age building my own PCs, getting excited about an OS (Win95), the tools of creation (the PC) differing from the tools of consumption (the smartphone/iPad). My son and daughter (3 and <1 yrs) will be exposed to PCs due to my job, but I bet a lot of their friends in daycare will see a tablet as "the way computing has been and always will be". (Honestly my kids may think that too, daddy just hasn't accepted how much of a dinosaur he is yet).

yomritoyj 9y ago
Just like in our generation there will be people in our kids' generation who will want to know how the sausage is made and it will be a tragedy if the only way to do so would be to grow up, join a big firm and sign a NDA. Even for the others, an open platform means a greater variety of software for end users. Creating toll gates on the way to software development or suppressing software which reduces the platform owners's profit is not good for end users. Many people who will never touch a command line still benefit because a Finnish computer science student could decide to start writing a PC operating system of his own and that OS now powers their phone or allows others to provide online services on servers that runs that OS. If building iPad clones with an open hardware specification like the PC's becomes possible for multiple vendors I'm sure we will see a software ecosystem that will easily beat the walled gardens. The problem is that currently the number of firms that can build the hardware is small enough that they find it in their self interest to use closed specifications.
pjmlp 9y ago
Similar age group here. As you remember the PCs were the outliers, everyone else was mostly offering the same hardware/software integration as tablets. In fact Apple is the surviving company of those integration and most OEMs what to get back to it, because they hardly make any money nowadays just selling parts. Had it not been for Compaq and a failed lawsuit, building our own PCs would have been an alternative universe, which I never bothered to do anyway (was more expensive than buying a full new PC on my region).
danaris 9y ago
I'm not sure there's really a contradiction there: "the hobbyist crowd" is, and has always been, much smaller than the general population, so even with commodity hardware and easy app creation leading to widespread adoption within that subgroup, you can still have more people overall wanting, buying, and using something more like an iPad.

jrs95 9y ago

To me it seems like the traditional PC model has too many downsides in terms of cost to support applications from a developer perspective as well as inferior security in comparison to a more sandboxed model. For most users, a walled garden is better than an open software ecosystem. That being said, I think the best hope we have for an open ecosystem at this point is web applications. They don't have the same downsides as the traditional PC software model. The sandboxing you get with web apps may restrict some of the functionality you could get relative to traditional PC software, but IMO the security benefits are far more important. The risk here is that these all end up being tied to centralized cloud services owned by a handful of giant tech companies, and that's ultimately not as open as we'd like. But it's at least a significant improvement over the App Store model.

michaelmrose 9y ago
A web site is running on someone else's hardware or running on your hardware but dependent upon others resources to operate. In theory you could open the websites sources but since the goal of app stores seems to be finding ways to monetize peoples data or get them to pay you monthly the end result will probably be unfriendly to tinkers, unfree, and closed. This generation will be poorer and dumber than the last.
realusername 9y ago
You can still have a sandboxed model with having the root user accessible, companies don't build that because they don't want the user to have any power on their machine but there's no technical limitation to do it.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I don't know if it still is the case, but in the early OS X adoption days Apple forums were full of people asking how to just run as root. So....
  - realusername 9y ago
    Of course you will always have people to try to run things as root but the option could just be hidden like the developer options on Android with a big warning that enabling root might destroy their phone.

_ph_ 9y ago

As I am trying to put my iPad Pro 12.9 to more productive use, the single most limiting thing is, that the files application does not have access to all apps document storage. E.g. I cannot move a movie file from iCloud to the TV app or vice versa. Nor can I easily move other files from app to app. Nor can I copy files from and to external media connected via USB. Images are special cased as apps can access the photo library and you can drag and drop them, but real file access via the files app would be more flexible. Fixing this should be possible without a conceptual change of the app concept and would enhance the productive use immensely. As a developer of course there is the other big limitiation: the constraints of developing software on the iPad. For me, this is the main distinction between a device and a computer: the ability to program it. Due to the app store and its rules, iOS is a very secure and stable environment. This makes the iOS platform very attractive, and I think it was the right approach to start with a restricted environment and remove some restrictions over time. So I do think it makes sense to limit distribution of apps to the app store, but the restriction on what apps can do on the device should be reviewed, even if that blurs the lines to the app store. An environment like termux, which still could be completely sandboxed, would increase the usability of the iPad a lot. Or even, going completely crazy, a whole Linux VM in an app sandbox. On the other side, having a full blown IDE for creating and locally running iOS applications would be a huge step forward. The hardware itself leaves little wishes - except perhaps for a small overwork of the smart keyboard to have that additional row of function keys (less urgent) and of course the escape key. And little improvements of the ergonomics of the cursor and the return key. While the non-programmers users probably can live with the current layout, I am really surprised that Apple is ignoring the needs of any programmers so thoroughly.

simonh 9y ago
>On the other side, having a full blown IDE for creating and locally running iOS applications would be a huge step forward. Are you aware of iOS Dev environments such as Pythonista? It’s even possible to take a Pythonista app, copy it into an XCode template and release it on the App Store, though of course that has to go via a Mac.