Aszland

Desktop computers are boring these days.  The last interesting thing that happened under the hood was the SSD drive. Before that, the leap from the Pentium to the Core2Duo.  How long has that been?  2006, folks.  There’s just really nothing going on except getting bigger, getting cheaper.

So, what is exciting? Phones, tablets, and to a lesser degree laptops.  It’s a two-fisted shot of miniaturization and focus on tactile and visually pleasing design.

The only reason laptops are interesting is because Apple keeps pushing the edge in design and appearance. Before the aluminum unibody Macbook showed up HP, Dell, and Acer were quite content to ship the same clunky plastic slabs they had been for years.  Piling more and more ports, card readers, biometrics, etc. At one point HP was shipping a 9 pound monster called the nx9600. It was a philosophy of “laptop with the most baggage wins!” Hanging off your arm, it was 9 pounds of boat anchor.

Then Apple said “Let’s strip off everything but two USB ports and an external video connector.  They made it really smooth to the touch, and gave it the best tactilely pleasant trackpad ever. They won with minimalism and beauty. I think that extends to the OS as well, but I’ll stick to hardware.

What did the PC laptop market do? They made visually identical clones, with unibody aluminum cases, glass trackpads, and shiny LED backlit screens.  Now, I don’t care how big of a PC apologist you happen to be, you cannot look at this and tell me that Apple doesn’t drive the laptop market.

For all of that, the laptop market is still somewhat boring.  This all happened a couple of years ago, and the dust has settled from that revolution. Where is the excitement now?  The laptop that fits in your pocket, and its bigger cousin, the tablet.

The PC market has had “tablets” for years and years. Nobody bought them. It was still the design philosophy of the 9 pound monster, just with a trick screen.  It was a lazy solution to a real demand, and the PC makers Jedi mind-tricked the consumer into thinking there was no demand. Now, once the iPad was announced, how many PC companies leapt up with “me too!” clones based on pure speculation?

Every one of them.  HP, Dell, Foxconn, Google, Acer, Sony, 100 Chinese knock-offs, and I could go on all day.  Those that are trying to run an existing desktop OS (Win7) are doomed before they start.

What hasn’t sunk in with the PC makers is that the competition is no longer about piling on of features, specs, and bullet points. It’s about making the user smile every time they touch their device, thinking how pleasing it is to interact with. You have to have enough power and design your code so that everything is silky smooth.  You dont’ need computing power just for sake of having more than a competitor on paper anymore.

In the mobile computing game, you win or lose based on three factors: Tactile pleasure of interaction, battery life, and user interface design and feel. Let’s break that down:

Tactile pleasure of interaction: Finger, not a stylus. One button, not many. Smooth, solid feel, not a creaky brick of plastic with visible seams. Don’t be a brick, either. I remember hating my win mobile HTC 8525 for breaking all of the above rules. That phone sucked.

Battery life: If you don’t realize that a user squealing “OMG I cannot believe how I went all weekend without charging my new _______. Wheee!” is the best word of mouth direct marketing your device can get, you’re dumb.

User interface: This is the “killer app” of any mobile device. Combining tactile feel with natural and silky smooth response from the device. A key comparison would be the most basic of UI responses: scrolling.  If your device doesn’t feel beautiful when you do something as simple as scroll a page of text, you fail.  Android, you fail.  That unnatural feel is a tiny irritation that will pick at a user every time they interact with your device.

While I have mixed feelings about Apple on some topics, and by no means am a Mac evangelist in any form, I cannot deny that they are currently steering the entire consumer electronics market right now.  They’re not doing it by having features, power, or best price.  They’re doing it solely with design aesthetic.  That’s why under the hood, computers are boring now.  I don’t care what’s going on in there.  What I care about is that whatever is under the hood enables the design to function without me noticing any disruptions in the beauty of it.  If your framerate never chugs, the scrolling never lags, and your app doesn’t take an eternity to launch, I’m perfectly content to never again care what is under the hood.

That’s coming pretty far, for someone who used to debate for hours about which motherboard, video card, chipset, cpu, and brand of RAM to put into every box I built – like, from 1997 until 2008.  About then, I ceased to care.  The innards are boring.  I’m now a design and UI focused person.