WHEN APPLE chief executive Tim Cook launched the new iPad in early March, it was the most eagerly anticipated hardware announcement in months, inspiring huge amounts of speculation ahead of its unveiling – the infamous Apple rumour mill was in overdrive.
But even before it was revealed, the reaction from large parts of the technoblogosphere was a resounding “meh”. Whatever the expectations were, and most of the rumour-mongers were proven largely correct, the new iPad still managed to leave many tech pundits underwhelmed.
The Associated Press ran a story before it launched suggesting the new device was only a modest improvement over the iPad 2. “The upgrade from the iPad 2 to the iPad 3 will be less significant than the upgrade from the original iPad to the iPad 2,” wrote Peter Svensson.
Matt Hartley, a journalist with Canada’s Financial Post, opined that “it now appears that Apple’s move from second to third generation iPad is even less of a bold leap forward and more of a tepid shuffle from an underwhelming top dog”.
At this point it is worth noting that the new iPad features some substantial improvements over its predecessor. As Apple blogger John Gruber put it: “If a faster processor, more RAM, a double-the-resolution retina display, a better camera, and maybe even LTE networking make for a ‘modest’ update, then what would it take for the iPad 3 to be deemed an immodest update? A fusion energy source? Teleportation? A camera that sees into the future?”
Now, it’s easy to see this as some sort of fable, with the tech press eating its own tail – it effectively illustrates the limits of spec- obsession, the lazy reliance on processor speeds and storage capacities and networking capabilities and so on to determine the superiority of one product over another. That might have been worthwhile in the PC era, arguably, but it is an increasingly irrelevant metric of quality assessment now.
But I suspect this tango of indifference points towards something more significant – the evolution of computing hardware is entering a new phase. We are in the early stages of the next era of personal computing, and the paradigm has already been established: we will be interacting with sheets of glass. It’s as simple and as liberatingly minimal as that.
Sure, the sheets of glass will have different dimensions and the processors and storage and battery will occupy subtly different enclosures behind that glass, but essentially the room for design differentiation has just been drastically narrowed.
For a tech press, and even a public, that has long relied on noticeably different hardware to signify progress, the prospect of subtly varied sheets of glass is possibly daunting. How do we know what to get excited by any more?
The reality is that when a device has been reduced to a glass screen, and the screen resolution gets doubled, quadrupling the number of pixels, then that in itself is a pretty big hardware advance.
As US tech journalist Ryan Block astutely put it: “Tablets strip away the abstractions or externalities, it’s just you and an app with absolutely nothing in between . . . So when a device comes along like the iPad that doesn’t just display the application, but actually becomes the application, radically improving its screen radically improves the experience.”
This hints at the reality of this new era of hardware innovation – the history of hardware innovation might be reaching an inflection point. From now on the big advances will be in software development, not hardware specifications. Progress will be determined not by whatever Intel chip is inside, but by the apps that become ever more intuitive, more fluid, more humane.
That trend is not strictly restricted to computing. There’s been a big fuss made over the Lytro, a fascinating new camera that pioneers something called light-field photography – essentially, instead of capturing light on a flat sensor, the Lytro captures the angles of all the beams of light entering its lens. This means that the image can be focused after the picture has been taken – it is a genuinely revolutionary leap in photographic hardware.
It’s the first massive advance in photographic technology since the Polaroid – but here’s the thing. The Lytro is useful for certain types of photographs, where there is an object in the foreground, offering different depths of field to focus on. That’s cool, for sure. But do you know what is even cooler?
Taking a photograph, perhaps adding a nostalgic filter to make the mundane appear profound, then instantly sharing it with your friends and the world. You sure can’t do that with a Lytro and you can’t even do it with a Canon 5D Mark III.
We are living through a revolution in photography, with exponentially more photographs being taken every year, and it’s a revolution being driven by the increasingly ubiquitous smartphone. It’s about the sheet of glass again, the stripping away of abstractions and externalities, until we are manipulating the photograph itself with our fingers. It’s about software, not hardware.
Photography won’t be the last field in which hardware becomes effectively invisible – next it will be car dashboards or cash registers or medical devices. Indeed, the future of tech hardware innovation could very well be a little dull for the next few years, but where that dull glass leads us is going to be very exciting.
