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.
