"My computer does too much!" I try and imagine the look on the face of the sales representative of any technology store as I repeat, "My computer does too much!" How delightful for him though. Any opportunity to sell something else to someone who thinks they need something else is graciously welcomed. But the statement itself is preposterous. Would he be inclined to ask me "What don't you want it to do?"

Since my interest in computers began circa the mid 80s the goal was to get as much storage space and processing power as humanly possible and when convenient, into a much smaller package. Anyone with the hardware bug remembers buying Gary Coleman sized tower cases with bays for 8 drives and enough room for a 12 slot motherboard. It was massive, it was loud, it was hot and it was beautiful - all four hundred and eighty six Dee Exes of it. Then along comes some company offering a product that doesn't have that much power and doesn't have that much storage but its small, quiet and esthetically pleasing. Here's the kicker. They charge more for it. The one that comes to my mind was called "the brick". As a glorified tech handyman I worked on many of these compact machines owned mostly by businessmen who had no idea why they had bought it in the first place. This was the target audience for this item: Someone who needs something because everyone else has one (a computer) but doesn't know what they need it for. If you can get someone to admit they don't "need all that power" then you can sell them on the amenities that no power can afford you to have. Since these guys didn't need it for anything anyways it was perfect for them and it did exactly what its name implied. It sat there and did absolutely nothing. It was a brick. It was useless.

To be fair however, we have to look at the other side of it. Who was I as a consumer of computer technology? Much like many of my lantastic using, bbsing, drug abusing friends, I was hellbent on building the most powerful computer ever. What did I do with it when I built it? Absolutely nothing. Those glorious machines of my youth seemed to have only 2 purposes...bragging rights and upgrading. Of all the software loaded onto it, the screen-saver was running most often. How many countless hours did I spend listening to Pink
Floyd - The Wall while staring at Berkeley AfterDark Screen-savers. I certainly don't remember. Unfortunately, the market for actually doing something with computers was booming with the delivery of moderately useful software like Microsoft Office. Laptops were becoming less and less something no one had and more and more something I didn't have. I was too poor to spend money on a portable version of something I did nothing with anyways. God damnit.

In the extremely late 90s, something very strange happened. While I will never fully understand the details that lead to the event, I actually got a job. The job was to beta test software for a stock market analysis program called TradeStation. And just like that, I actually had something to do with my computer. This software was "robust"
and required a lot of power and a lot of storage. OMG! I Totally have exactly that sitting in my bedroom. Could SETI @ Home handle the loss of my machine and still proceed with its mission? They would have to cause now I had work to do and so did my desktop. But still, look at all those executives wandering to and from meetings with those laptops? Bastards! Those things must be really useful. Interestingly enough however, when you get a job, you get a paycheck. With mine, I bought my first laptop.

I remember it well. The Sony VAIO VX-some-number had the appeal of being very rugged looking hardware. It wasn't uncommon for me to drop things so I figured I might as well go for the laptop that looked like it could be dropped. The other very appealing thing was the price: 800 bucks. Sure it was A Duron, the AMD version of the Celeron, but that was enough power wasn't it? Not even remotely. My desktop was an Athlon 750 and it totally smoked my laptop. But of course, why wouldn't it. It was roughly $2000 dollars worth of the latest
and greatest accumulated over time. The fact that it hadn't been upgraded in over a year didn't make the brand new laptop faster. So while it was neat having a laptop or notebooks as they had by that time become known, it couldn't handle TradeStation. I could load up mp3s AVIs with it. I could run DVD's on it and play a few games here and there but that doesn't sound much more impressive than a portable dvd player or a gameboy. In the end, I couldn't do my job with it. It was useless. It was back to my desktop. But I am older now and have some purpose in life. All of a sudden my 4 foot tall tower was crowding me. The cooling fans were deafening and the power supplies were too effin hot. I needed to downsize this desktop. The technology had been there for a while. Now that I had some money to play around with, there's no good reason not to. I purchased a smaller case and a newer motherboard that was meant to be compact. Why have 8 drive bays when hard drives are so big now, you only need 1? A trip to the computer show and a few online orders later, I had a mini tower with all the power of my older giantamo desktop. It runs TradeStation like a charm. I am content. The machine is useful and so am I.

Flash Foward. Now it is 2010. My desktop days are over. I think I have pieces-parts of them floating around in toolboxes and such. Stuff I keep for no good reason, but as anyone who ever built computers before knows, the day after you throw away that 8 meg video card you will encounter the mission critical project that needs exactly that. So we keep things. Notebook computers have caught up with desktops in pretty much every way except the flexibility. Upgrades are pointless. If a notebook lasts 2 years, buy a new one and you are up to date. I've tried many sized notebooks from 12 inch to 17 inch. For a long time I was pretty happy with the 15 but I find that I take my notebook with me less and less so why not get one with the biggest screen possible. Cloud computing has made the personal computer a virtual thing anyways. My computer is wherever I am logged in. Your computer is wherever you are logged in - unless it's been hijacked by chinese teenagers (it probably has). So (pay attention here's the point) notebooks as they exist today are a culmination of many failed attempts to get the right amount of power into the smallest possible human usable hardware. I have a fast processor. I have a lot of disk space. I have a keyboard and I have a mouse (with 2 buttons by the way). I have a smart phone that can surf the internet, read email, play music and videos and all that. I even installed an ssh client on it so I can reboot my servers from the confessional if I must. But I don't actually use the phone for any of these things. It's inconvenient at best. At worst its pretty much as useless as I am with it.

So how is an iPad going to help the world be more productive? For useful people, the writing is already on the wall about the minimum to maximum power at the minimum to maximum size.

What am I going to do with something smaller, with less space and less power and no feasible human interface that admittedly can't do what my pc can? I am not going to do anything with it. Compared to my negligibly bigger laptop the iPad is merely a toy. It is useless.

And somehow I suspect that anyone who finds an iPad to be even remotely useful...probably isn't.

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