[UPDATED below.]

Farhad Manjoo loves the iPad because it’s beautiful and shiny but also because it’s a giant step towards turning computers into appliances. I was right there with him until a thought struck me: if a generation of kids grows up with computing appliances instead of *computers*, what kind of geeks will they be? Will they even BE geeks in the sense that we currently use that term?

The question comes out of a fundamental difference between computing appliances (CAs from here on out) like the iPad, and personal computers (PCs, by which I mean Wintels, Macs, Linux boxes, etc). A PC is a (sort of) universal computer: theoretically, it can be made to do any processing task with the right program and enough time/memory/whatever. But a CA is a single-purpose or limited-purpose device like any other appliance: a toaster may toast bagels, bread, muffins and pop tarts, but it’s basically meant for one context and one purpose. No one really thinks of “programming” or “hacking” an appliance–or at least not in the evil-genius, “wow, I can make this box do my bidding in all these interesting ways!” way that most of us associate with PC geekery.

I’m a bit out of my element here because I am not a hacker or geek in the usual sense myself–I’ve never re/programmed, hacked or rooted my PC or anything else. But from what I can tell, all the modern titans of tech–from Gates and Jobs and Woz to Page and Brin and The Zuck–they all DID do that kind of stuff in their formative years. And that experience turned them into who they are today. (Right? Am I getting my history correct?)

Now take a kid who’s say, turning 12 in the year 2020. To him, “computing” and “computers” are terms as archaic as ENIAC is to us. Instead, he’s grown up with a ubiquity of CA’s–networked appliances that “do computing” but do it invisibly, in specific contexts for a limited array of tasks. He picks up his touchpad to scan news and social networks and watch some videos over cereal. His smartphone tells him where to be, when, how to get there, and all that stuff. Maybe the dashboard in Mom’s car does some other computery shit on his ride to school, and maybe his desk at school is another specific touch/tablet-like dashboard for school stuff. The point is, at no point in the day does he sit down at his “computer” and think, “what do I want to do/try with this thing today?”

Twitter user @REAS put it succinctly:

The iPad is for consuming media, not producing media — I don’t like that direction.

I think his worry might go even further and apply to geeky creativity in general, because CAs, by their very nature, don’t invite creativity. They are not inspirational. Think of what interests a toddler more: a shiny plastic robot that beeps and whirrs and walks, or the cardboard box it came in? CAs are the robot; PCs are (were?) the box.

Appliances (and, I believe, CAs like the iPad and pre-touch iPods) have very specific “affordances” designed into them–that’s the whole point. You look at a well-designed appliance and think, “I know exactly what that is for, and how to use it.” PCs aren’t like that. The whole point of them was to make you wonder (in a good way) “what can I do with that, and how?”

People are bitching that the iPad doesn’t do Flash, that it’s a closed proprietary system, that it doesn’t have this or be made to do that. Well, what did they expect? They’re complaining that an appliance isn’t a computer. That’s like complaining that your washing machine won’t let you make toast. Or do anything else you might come up with off the top of your head.

Which is fine. I can think of specific contexts that an iPad might be quite useful. But what kind of geekery is it (and its ilk) going to inspire in anyone? When rigorously designed digital appliances are everywhere and powerful, open-ended PCs become quaint tchotchkes, what will digital innovators look like?

Maybe I’m just not enough of a geek myself to tell.

Postscript: Ironically, Apple’s first blockbuster CA–the iPod–has been steadily evolving in the opposite direction as it converged with the iPhone’s touchscreen technology. Now you can pick up an iPhone and actually do think to yourself, “what is this device capable of? What can I make it do?” in that PC-ish, open-ended, associative, inspirational, creative, non-appliancey way. I think this is because the mobile phone IS the new PC. (Not that a jillion other people haven’t already had that thought.)

Updated 1/30/10: Turns out my hunch about a CA-saturated world’s effect on the geek mindset was on the money, at least in a few well-cited instances that were burning up Techmeme yesterday. They said it much better than I did above, so I’ll summarize:

In a post about “the tinkerer’s sunset”, Alex Payne called the iPad “an attractive, thoughtfully designed, deeply cynical thing… that does little to enable creativity… if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write.”

Mark Pilgrim, who says he “became who [he is] by tinkering” with impunity in BASIC on an Apple ][e, is distressed by the fact that in an era of iPads and similar CAs, to tinker means “trespassing” on ONE’S OWN COMPUTER (by cracking DRM or jailbreaking, with the associated consequences) or paying Apple for the privilege of “developing” via an SDK. “And that’s fine for the developers of today, because they already know that they’re developers. But the developers of tomorrow don’t know it yet. And without the freedom to tinker, some of them never will.”

Finally, Annalee Newitz at io9 called the iPad “crap futurism” because in presenting a “convergence device,” the iPad turns a powerful computer into a stunted combination of 1950s television set and shopping mall.

This all crystallizes my own point: the difference between “real computers” and CAs is that you don’t have to break them in order to play with them or control them. If CAs remain “secondary computers” compared to PCs this isn’t a big deal, but that’s the whole point: I don’t really think they will.

Of course, whatever “consequences” there are of this new development in the evolution of computers will likely fall somewhere in between the doomsayers and utopianists. As a secondary computer-as-couchbound-digital-consumption-terminal, I find the iPad very appealing. And as a writer and filmmaker, I get excited by the prospect of the iPad creating new opportunities for my own work to reach readers and viewers.

But my cynical self doesn’t think the iPad, or any CA, is going to inspire the next generation of geek-innovators in any meaningful, world-changing, Cambrian-Explosion type way. Thanks to platforms like Android, the new tinkerers will probably all be focused on their phones, since those are steadily morphing into the new PCs–more personal, in fact, than a PC ever was. Now that’ll be exciting.

[This is long and probably hard to read on this blog. I also posted it to my Tumblr, which might be easier on the eyes.]

OK, so the whole world knows that The New York Times committed itself to stuffing the “free news on the internet” genie back into the bottle. Details haven’t been worked out, but the idea seems to be that they’re going to charge an access fee to “heavy users” while letting casual readers dip into a limited number of articles or pageviews for free.

I’m hardly alone in thinking this is a bad idea that will fail to fix the Times’s problems. But not because the very idea of charging for digital goods is an abomination. It’s a fine idea. But this particular version of that idea will fail because a paywalled New York Times is not better than free. And it needs to be.

Free is pretty great. It’s everywhere, it’s the bedrock of 10+ years of internet culture. So anything that costs money has to be… better than free. It’s that simple. So simple as to sound meaningless and tautological, perhaps. But it’s not. It’s just gotten obscured by a lot of hand-waving and hoo-hahery and answers to questions that are easier to ask than the one that really matters.

I have paid for digital goods with no gritting of teeth at all. You have too. But one thing HAS to be clear and true in order for that to take place. It has to be better than free. A five-year-old can understand this.

Example: I paid a couple bucks for the paid version of the Instapaper iPhone app. People pay for apps all the time, but I single this out because I’m not a heavy iPhone user (I only have an iPod Touch) and this is the only non-free app I’ve ever installed. I used the free version of Instapaper for a couple weeks and then (miracle!) I actually sought out the paid version. I was eager to buy it–and it’s on the expensive side for an iPhone app. This is the kind of customer any business–digital or otherwise–wants and needs in order to thrive.

Why is the paid version of Instapaper better than free? Because it is a more powerful product that does what it does BETTER and EASIER than the free version. (Is this sounding like a broken record yet?)

What is better and easier for readers about consuming news behind a paywall, compared to free? Absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell. It’s literally the opposite of something worth paying for: it removes ease of use, powerful functionality, accessibility, depth, and other things we’ve become accustomed to. Therefore it is unavoidably, fundamentally, inherently subtractive. What kind of person seeks out and is eager to part with her money for that privilege? The only way to make that transaction happen is to force someone into it. And the word we usually use for that kind of thing is “penalty,” “fine,” or–in the least-worst case–”tax.” And nobody puts up with taxes unless you’re the government.

So when the whole internet convulses over paywall announcements like this, we’re not flipping the bird to basic economic reality. (Well OK, some people are, but they are mostly 4chan types.) What we really mean is, “Don’t tax me, bro!”

The New York Times has a whole R&D division. Their mission is supposedly to develop new “products.” A tax on your best customers isn’t a product. Can’t they come up with something that’s better than free? Something I want to buy? Times Skimmer is super-neat and all, but it’s not adding any essential value to what’s already on offer.

I wonder what they’re asking themselves in that department–what the core unifying question is that underlies all their experiments. If, at the end of the day, it doesn’t somehow reduce to “What can we create that’s better than free?” then they’re kind of just fucking around while Rome burns, aren’t they?

It’s a hard fricking question to ask, but at least it’s a clear one. And answers are out there. Keith Kelly has some good ideas to get started with. (In fact, I stole the whole “better than free” coinage from him.)

In a few hours, I will finally, belatedly, receive my first smartphone. I’m salivating in anticipation. But I’ve hung onto my cheap, rocksolid LG “dumbphone” (ie, it calls, txts, takes photos, and that’s about it) for years, and not felt like I was missing much. Sure, it’s irritating not to be able to call up a map when I’m walking around, or check my email in an airport. But do I really NEED to be able to do those things, lest I dissolve into a steaming puddle of screaming goo like Stripe at the end of Gremlins? No.

So it was in that spirit that a few months ago I wrote a short piece for New York magazine reviewing the dumbest of the dumbphones, the Forrest Gump of telecommunication: the Jitterbug. (You know, that “cell phone for old people” you see advertised in in Parade magazine inserts.)

I used the thing as my primary cell for two whole weeks. My world did not end. In fact, there was plenty to like about it. Unfortunately, New York killed the review for space issues. So now, on the eve of my willing entry into the app-obsessed, always-on smartphone universe, I present: In Praise of the Dumbphone.

No apps. No GPS. No web, calendar or camera. The Samsung Jitterbug is the anti-smartphone, which is to say: dumb as a rock. And that’s the point.

Granted, the J’s bulky, blobby shape won’t turn heads. And with no T9 predictive spelling, text-messaging is crude at best. But there’s an odd freedom in embracing Jitterbug’s limitations. Let your friends Google that restaurant, find that showtime, read that map: when they figure things out, they’ve got your number.

Take that, Gizmodo.

I was just visiting my late-60’s-year-old mother, and (as usual) complaining to high heaven about the state of her digital/internet existence: an underpowered, beyond-obsolete eMac with a dialup internet connection. We started talking about what, in a perfect world, would be the best thing for her to upgrade to (besides cable internet, for god’s sake). As we have seen, “old people-optimized tech” is becoming quite the niche.

But when I thought frankly about it, I couldn’t help but think that perhaps the best computer for an aging person who “just wants something that works” isn’t a ruthlessly simplified internet appliance, but the exact opposite: a top of the line, specced-to-the-nines, more-horsepower-than-she’ll-ever-come-close-to-using desktop supercomputer.

Why? Isn’t all that expensive power just going to be “wasted” on someone like my mom?

Absolutely. And that’s the whole point.

In fact, the whole idea of modern computer interfaces is completely predicated on “wasting” formidable computing power on frivolous things like graphical user interfaces, onscreen animation, and eye candy of every sort. (You know, all the stuff that makes using your computer NOT require the intelligence of an astrophysicist and the temperament of an actuary.)

And if there’s anyone who needs a maximized amount of wasted power working in their favor, it’s a 66-year-old lady going on the internet. SO:

1. She should have the fastest processor that money can buy (within reason), to reduce lagging and latency to a point indistinguishable from zero. In fact, an overpowered processor is the perfect investment for a non-power-user, because it will ensure that any of the simple things she does with her computer for the next X years will still happen near-instantaneously long after her machine is technically obsolete. Also, as the internet continues to grow in sophistication, “simple things” will become more processor-intensive whether we like it or not.

2. She should be maxed out like a mothertrucker on RAM. Not because she’s going to be multitasking between Final Cut Pro and AfterEffects. Rather, because again, anything that happens instantly and seamlessly is one less thing for her to even THINK about when using her computer. Plus, old people are not geniuses with file management. They dump everything on their desktop so they don’t “lose” it and keep application windows open in perpetuity. Having more RAM than is humanly necessary will offset these bad habits and ensure that whatever memory-hungry applications might come down the pike in the next 5 years, she’ll always have more than enough to never see a spinning beach ball.

3. She should have a huge hard drive. Will my Mom be stocking up untold gigabytes of torrent files and lossless music? Of course not, but having a 1TB black hole inside her computer just means (again, are you seeing a pattern?) that she doesn’t have to think, choose, hem or haw in any way about saving things, ever. No matter how many baby pictures or videos of grandchildren get sent her way.

4. She should have the latest and greatest major OS. An old person’s computer should be a seamless link between them and the same robust digital “present tense” that the rest of the world is living in, especially their children and grandchildren. Custom OS’s like the one on the Litl or this new one are awesome in their own limited, circumscribed ways, but if few people are using them, that’s just another possible barrier for seamless communication (I think)–the elderly user gets pushed into a ghetto with different basic rules and tools than everyone else. At this point, is OS X or Windows 7 really that daunting on the surface? No. But they’re still flexible and powerful enough to handle whatever’s coming in the near future that might turn out to be as ubiquitous as Youtube or videochatting has. I don’t want to ever have to say to my Mom, “Ooh sorry, your computer can’t do that.”

What all this means is that if I had my druthers, I’d set my mom up with a rig that would blow my own current system out of the water, performance-wise. But that’s the thing: I’m going to own three or four new systems in the next ten years. My mom won’t, and shouldn’t have to.