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My Turn is Low End Mac's column for reader-submitted
articles. It's your turn to share your thoughts on all things
Mac (or iPhone, iPod, etc.) and write for the Mac web. Email your
submission to Dan Knight
.
We received the following letter in response to Adam Robert Guha's
A New Age in Personal
Computing. It is published with the author's permission.
Adam,
I think you're looking at this the wrong way. The all-purpose home
computer is not dead. This is obvious in Apple's digital hub
strategy. The plan in this strategy is to be able to use the Mac for
everything including CD burning, MP3s, Web surfing, movie editing,
word processing, and so on - just like you could use the 1996
Performa for word processing, interactive encyclopedias, AOL, and
surfing (to a lesser extent). In fact, nowadays the Mac is even more
of an all-purpose computer than before, because it does not do only
what the family needs it to do, but it's perfect for the business
user, the artist, and the developer, too!
I think the reason why families nowadays have two or more
computers is because most parents will no longer tolerate waiting for
Junior to finish playing Quake so Dad can do his income tax, or
waiting for the daughter to finish listening to iTunes so Mom can
organize her itinerary. This was always a problem, and now that
the base level Mac starts at
$799 (in 2002 dollars), instead of ~$1,599 in 1996 dollars (for the
Performa), every middle-class family can afford to have at least two
Macs in the house. In addition, I believe that if you survey these
families with two or more Macs, many of them still have their
Performa 6300, or a clone of the
same era, and a good portion of these people still use them.
To put it simply, Adam, I don't think that the increasing number
of computers per family is due to the death of the all-purpose
computer. Indeed, all Macs nowadays can perform just about any
function, including many things that nobody believed a computer could
do in 1996. This trend is more indicative of the fact that all
members of the family demand computer time, and the decreasing cost
of Macs and PCs over the last six years allows families to meet this
demand.
It is my prediction that six years from now, the all-purpose
digital hub will be thriving, and it will equal or exceed the number
of televisions per capita in the middle-class home. These computers
will also do things that nobody today can imagine computers will
do.
Jesse Mathewson used to be the webmaster for Apple's
Orchard, which has been looking for a new webmaster since
November 2000.
Share your perspective on the Mac by emailing with "My Turn" as your subject.
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