Friday, January 29, 2010

The iPad: Bringing Automatic Transmission to the Computer?

ipad_auto John Gruber:

Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.

That’s where Apple is taking computing. A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn’t need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.

Read the whole thing.

(HT Tyler Cowen)

1 comment:

Ali Hasanain said...

Automatics suck! Manuals are far more involving, and usually perform better and get better mileage too!

Ermm, I seem to have missed the point of the post though...