21 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
21 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: post
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status: publish
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published: true
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title: The iPad's Automatic Transmission
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date: '2010-01-30 00:00:35 -0500'
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categories:
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- Outside Content
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- Personal
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tags: []
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---
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This seems <em>exactly</em> right to me:
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<blockquote>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.
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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.
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That's not to say there aren't trade-offs involved. Car enthusiasts (and genuine experts like race car drivers) still drive cars with manual transmissions. They offer more control; they're more efficient. But the vast majority of cars sold today are automatics. So too it'll be with computers. Eventually, the vast majority will be like the iPad in terms of the degree to which the underlying *computer* is abstracted away. Manual computers, like the Mac and Windows PCs, will slowly shift from the standard to the niche, something of interest only to experts and enthusiasts and developers.<br />
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<cite>[Daring Fireball](http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/various_ipad_thoughts)</cite></blockquote>
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