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My parents both fairly recently bought iPads. Previously they used a Windows laptop and an Ubuntu desktop - both far more powerful and giving far more control.

My parents both fairly recently bought iPads. Previously they used a Windows laptop and an Ubuntu desktop - both far more powerful and giving far more control. Or at least that's one way of looking at it. Their iPads may have limits on their functionality, but as a result of their simplicity, they enable my parents to control a lot more of their computing experience. They rent movies, read books, use RSS (!) via Flipboard, edit photos, install apps (previously they would never install software) and - most importantly - they experiment with new things. Unlike the old PCs, which they'd become more fearful of with every inevitable fault or virus, with their iPads they can just hit the home button. For you and I, you're right - mobile can be limiting. But don't underestimate the power of mobile for those previously intimidated by computers.

__Joker 11y ago
I think the argument should be(or is) whether I can have a computing experience other than that provided currently by Apple, Google et all. I think historically user has lost once, seriously Linux never delivered the promised land for more mass users. I would be more interested if users can have mobile experience which is not tainted by interest of big co-operations. Unless there is an alternative, I hardly doubt there will be any change in status quo.
- seqastian 11y ago
  firefoxOS to the rescue.
  - s73v3r 11y ago
    How would that be any different?
- netcan 11y ago
  if it comes, the big corporate interest will have been "The shoulders of giants." Apple's iphone, the competition from Google and all the financial benefits from that have generated a lot of progress fast. I use open office, and it's a good example I think. If we didn't have MS office, would we have open office? would it be as good? If Firefox OS succeeds, would it ever have been made without the smartphone market having already been defined?
- jp555 11y ago
  "if users can have mobile experience which is not tainted by interest of big co-operations" This is impossible. All co-operation has biases, for profit or for another reason, everything comes with "strategy-taxes".
netcan 11y ago
This is an important point that often seems lost when abstracting out concepts like "power" and "control." There is some theoretical sense in which a user of free software has a lot of control, including the power to change it. Software being free can have a lot of indirect benefits to the user, but ultimately practical "power" is a function of what you can practically do with it, and that is very different from what the thing can theoretically do. Apple probably has motives for the app store other than making user experiences simple. But, they also really have the goal (and the effect) of making the user experience easier, which puts more real power into real hands. If the below median user can install a photo sharing app to see her nieces photo collage, that's real power in users hands. Also, I think being strict and abstract about "exclusively to advance the interests of its owner" is losing a lot of important texture. First, very few technological benefits go exclusively to anyone. They go to users, vendors, various other users and vendors. A lot of them get released into the ether as externality vapors, like productivity or ideas for new technology. The reality of the current state of computing is interesting, but it's very hairy and hard to grasp and boil down to simple abstractions. When we use our phones, we are interacting with other people, generating data/content on other people's phones, in various databases to the benefit of a bunch of people/companies. When you are using your navigation app, generating data about traffic, you are benefiting the app, other osiers. Possibly future users. Possibly that data will be sued in other ways. Maybe a construction company will buys it to plan new roads (and win a contract) which will benefit the city… Maybe someone's girlfriend will one day have it beamed to her implant to estimate when Brian will arrive. Is this bad because it's not to the exclusive benefit of the user? The benefit to the user would not even be possible with this mesh of stuff.
vacri 11y ago
My mother bought an iPad at the age of 67. She's not remotely technical - before she got a mac, I'd routinely get support calls of the quality "help! microsoft isn't working!", where 'microsoft' meant anything from Word to a browser to, well, anything. Anyway, the ipad was used for about a month, then plonked on a shelf to gather dust as she went back to her macbook. As a naif and something of a technophobe, she definitely did benefit from moving from Windows to OSX (back in the late XP days), but iOS left her cold.
erikb 11y ago
Doing more and having more control are not interchangeable. Your parents reading more books on their computer means they do more. More control means they know what happens inside the software/machine and they can change something about that. You are right that people don't care about control as much as an idea of it. And you are also right that giving control to someone else who can get a value out of you might result in you being able to do more, but at some point having no control over ones life will bite people in the ass. And that's what the control topic is about. In a simple example Apple can decide to not show the books to your parents any more. There is nothing they can do about it. Getting your Linux computer to work right takes time but then it's much less likely that a software can delete your data or if they delete it you are more likely to have a backup because you put sweat into configuring your system that way.
- robbiemitchell 11y ago
  > Getting your Linux computer to work right takes time but It doesn't just take more time; once something is sufficiently difficult, it goes from incrementally time-consuming to insurmountable (for most people) -- it might as well not exist.
  - erikb 11y ago
    Did we just move from "What is control? How do I get control?" to "Linux is probably insurmountable so we don't even have to try"?
    - corysama 11y ago
      If my parents ask "How do I get control?" And someone answers "Getting Linux to work takes some time, but..." Their response should be that they won't even try. My parents have a hard time with the concept that there are things called "files". Directories are completely beyond them.
      - erikb 11y ago
        I never intended to convince you or your parents to use Linux. It's just, that you said that they are able to do more, therefore they have more control. If you understand that the opposite might be the case then my job is done. In some scenarios it's okay to have less control in exchange to do more. I do such exchanges on a regular basis myself. But one must be aware that one gives away control, not gains control.
eugenejen 11y ago
your parent's experiences just what PG pondered in 2008. http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html "2. Simplified browsing. There are a lot of cases where you'd trade some of the power of a web browser for greater simplicity. Grandparents and small children don't want the full web; they want to communicate and share pictures and look things up. What viable ideas lie undiscovered in the space between a digital photo frame and a computer running Firefox? If you built one now, who else would use it besides grandparents and small children? " After 7 years, we know clearly now tablets/phones and mobile apps are the answers for that question for the present.
WorldWideWayne 11y ago
I just got my wife a Surface Pro 3 and now she doesn't use her iPad anymore. She rents movies, reads books, uses RSS via Flipboard, edits photos, installs apps and experiments with things. She also takes notes with the stylus, rips songs from YouTube and has Adblock installed in Chrome (edit: and after all that, she can throw it in the docking station connected to a 2nd large touch screen, keyboard and mouse) - things she could never do on an iPad. So yeah, mobile is limiting but it doesn't have to be. Once you venture outside of Apple's cold embrace, many things are possible.
- kaolinite 11y ago
  The Surface is a strange one, seeing as it is both a PC and a mobile device in one. There are upsides - as you've mentioned - but downsides too. I suspect my parents might not be quite as comfortable using a Surface than they are with an iPad. I'm glad your wife is enjoying it, though. However, I'm really not trying to get into a war between platforms. My point is that adding limitations, which many of us see as reducing how powerful a device is, can actually enable the user to go further and do more than they could previously.

__Joker 11y ago

I think the argument should be(or is) whether I can have a computing experience other than that provided currently by Apple, Google et all. I think historically user has lost once, seriously Linux never delivered the promised land for more mass users. I would be more interested if users can have mobile experience which is not tainted by interest of big co-operations. Unless there is an alternative, I hardly doubt there will be any change in status quo.

seqastian 11y ago
firefoxOS to the rescue.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  How would that be any different?
netcan 11y ago
if it comes, the big corporate interest will have been "The shoulders of giants." Apple's iphone, the competition from Google and all the financial benefits from that have generated a lot of progress fast. I use open office, and it's a good example I think. If we didn't have MS office, would we have open office? would it be as good? If Firefox OS succeeds, would it ever have been made without the smartphone market having already been defined?
jp555 11y ago
"if users can have mobile experience which is not tainted by interest of big co-operations" This is impossible. All co-operation has biases, for profit or for another reason, everything comes with "strategy-taxes".

netcan 11y ago

This is an important point that often seems lost when abstracting out concepts like "power" and "control." There is some theoretical sense in which a user of free software has a lot of control, including the power to change it. Software being free can have a lot of indirect benefits to the user, but ultimately practical "power" is a function of what you can practically do with it, and that is very different from what the thing can theoretically do. Apple probably has motives for the app store other than making user experiences simple. But, they also really have the goal (and the effect) of making the user experience easier, which puts more real power into real hands. If the below median user can install a photo sharing app to see her nieces photo collage, that's real power in users hands. Also, I think being strict and abstract about "exclusively to advance the interests of its owner" is losing a lot of important texture. First, very few technological benefits go exclusively to anyone. They go to users, vendors, various other users and vendors. A lot of them get released into the ether as externality vapors, like productivity or ideas for new technology. The reality of the current state of computing is interesting, but it's very hairy and hard to grasp and boil down to simple abstractions. When we use our phones, we are interacting with other people, generating data/content on other people's phones, in various databases to the benefit of a bunch of people/companies. When you are using your navigation app, generating data about traffic, you are benefiting the app, other osiers. Possibly future users. Possibly that data will be sued in other ways. Maybe a construction company will buys it to plan new roads (and win a contract) which will benefit the city… Maybe someone's girlfriend will one day have it beamed to her implant to estimate when Brian will arrive. Is this bad because it's not to the exclusive benefit of the user? The benefit to the user would not even be possible with this mesh of stuff.

vacri 11y ago

My mother bought an iPad at the age of 67. She's not remotely technical - before she got a mac, I'd routinely get support calls of the quality "help! microsoft isn't working!", where 'microsoft' meant anything from Word to a browser to, well, anything. Anyway, the ipad was used for about a month, then plonked on a shelf to gather dust as she went back to her macbook. As a naif and something of a technophobe, she definitely did benefit from moving from Windows to OSX (back in the late XP days), but iOS left her cold.

erikb 11y ago

Doing more and having more control are not interchangeable. Your parents reading more books on their computer means they do more. More control means they know what happens inside the software/machine and they can change something about that. You are right that people don't care about control as much as an idea of it. And you are also right that giving control to someone else who can get a value out of you might result in you being able to do more, but at some point having no control over ones life will bite people in the ass. And that's what the control topic is about. In a simple example Apple can decide to not show the books to your parents any more. There is nothing they can do about it. Getting your Linux computer to work right takes time but then it's much less likely that a software can delete your data or if they delete it you are more likely to have a backup because you put sweat into configuring your system that way.

robbiemitchell 11y ago
> Getting your Linux computer to work right takes time but It doesn't just take more time; once something is sufficiently difficult, it goes from incrementally time-consuming to insurmountable (for most people) -- it might as well not exist.
- erikb 11y ago
  Did we just move from "What is control? How do I get control?" to "Linux is probably insurmountable so we don't even have to try"?
  - corysama 11y ago
    If my parents ask "How do I get control?" And someone answers "Getting Linux to work takes some time, but..." Their response should be that they won't even try. My parents have a hard time with the concept that there are things called "files". Directories are completely beyond them.
    - erikb 11y ago
      I never intended to convince you or your parents to use Linux. It's just, that you said that they are able to do more, therefore they have more control. If you understand that the opposite might be the case then my job is done. In some scenarios it's okay to have less control in exchange to do more. I do such exchanges on a regular basis myself. But one must be aware that one gives away control, not gains control.

eugenejen 11y ago

your parent's experiences just what PG pondered in 2008. http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html "2. Simplified browsing. There are a lot of cases where you'd trade some of the power of a web browser for greater simplicity. Grandparents and small children don't want the full web; they want to communicate and share pictures and look things up. What viable ideas lie undiscovered in the space between a digital photo frame and a computer running Firefox? If you built one now, who else would use it besides grandparents and small children? " After 7 years, we know clearly now tablets/phones and mobile apps are the answers for that question for the present.

WorldWideWayne 11y ago

I just got my wife a Surface Pro 3 and now she doesn't use her iPad anymore. She rents movies, reads books, uses RSS via Flipboard, edits photos, installs apps and experiments with things. She also takes notes with the stylus, rips songs from YouTube and has Adblock installed in Chrome (edit: and after all that, she can throw it in the docking station connected to a 2nd large touch screen, keyboard and mouse) - things she could never do on an iPad. So yeah, mobile is limiting but it doesn't have to be. Once you venture outside of Apple's cold embrace, many things are possible.

kaolinite 11y ago
The Surface is a strange one, seeing as it is both a PC and a mobile device in one. There are upsides - as you've mentioned - but downsides too. I suspect my parents might not be quite as comfortable using a Surface than they are with an iPad. I'm glad your wife is enjoying it, though. However, I'm really not trying to get into a war between platforms. My point is that adding limitations, which many of us see as reducing how powerful a device is, can actually enable the user to go further and do more than they could previously.