kewms, thank you for causing me to stop and think. Again.
For that model, the hardware still needs to be expensive enough for the user to care about it. If you lose your $10 tablet, no big deal, you just get another one… but then Amazon has to recover 2x$200 worth of electronics cost just to break even.
Katherine
That’s true, but I think the mobile industry has sufficiently solved that problem, even for electronics that they charge no money at all for. The “insurance” and replacement cost system covers those cases where they would otherwise lose out. It’s basically group-sourcing the cost of the use of electronics over a large enough group of people so that the outliers do not matter as the bulk of the population is fact paying more for the device, amortised over a period of a few years, than they would have up front if they covered the MSRP of the device. If we can get “smart paper” down to the cost-to-producer of a feature phone by 2025 or so, I don’t think it would be unreasonable to expect the service to be bearing the brunt of the cost, especially since Internet storage services by then will in all likelihood be how most people “store data”. Services will be vital.
I think there are a couple of contradictions here. Your original specification was that the device be cheap enough for you to not care if it gets lost. But the vendor – one way or another – needs to minimize losses in order to make the business model work. So why not just raise the price point so the user will care?
Along the same lines, the available free phones are not iPhones and Samsung Galaxy Nexuses (Nexii?). They’re mostly pretty stripped down, to the point where part of the idea seems to be to upsell people to better phones, with a two-year contract renewal thrown in.
Katherine
On the other hand… 2025? Sure. In 1999, the big battle was between Microsoft and AOL, Apple was clawing its way back to relevance, Google was barely more than a research project, and Facebook didn’t exist. Who knows what the hot new technology will be 13 years from now.
Katherine
Well that’s exactly what I’m talking about. I did say I was still waiting. 
I’m perfectly happy to wait until my magic comes along, until then paper and pen will do me fine. While I haven’t ever owned an iPhone, I have owned an iPod Touch (which universal access aside is the same thing), and while I really liked it, I still did not find a good rapport with it as a tool for capturing my thoughts during the day. It was all right, but the small screen and lack of stylus felt limiting to me. Something I could spread out to a full sheet of paper and put a “pen” to is really what would work for me.
But yes, you can get iPhones for free now. Maybe not the latest and greatest, but I think some of the older models are available for just the cost of signing up to use it, and while they may not boast Siri (officially anyway, there are hacks), I think you can install iOS 5 on them.
iPhone 3GS free from AT&T with new 2 yr contract. $5/mo insurance.
Just providing the stat since Ioa forgot his citation.
Too much homework. Sorry.
Hrm, not a huge fan of smart devices. When I want to get away from tech, I leave the cell at home. Ditto for a laptop.
That having been said, why are the choices in this thread only OS X, iOS, or Windows? Why should my “not-mac” choice be Windows? Why is my “not-Windows” choice Mac? PCs run more operating systems than Windows. I wouldn’t mind seeing a return to the early 90’s or so: there seemed to be so much more innovation, and everyone had an OS and system out. I think the loss of those companies and operating systems signals a bigger loss–an identification with a market share as a picture of reality. Neither Windows nor Apple has that imagination, and big distros are forcing Linux to lose it, as well. The thing I loved most about using Linux back in the day was that I could choose so many things, even down to the workings of the operating system, itself. In a sense, the OS was an extension of my creative process (also why I gravitate towards a distro like Slackware.)
But then again you’re talking to the person, who used Enlightenment for years, rather than side with KDE or GNOME.
You forgot Android, which is a very legitimate alternative.
The reason why the OS space has narrowed, though, is that (almost) no one cares what OS their device runs, they care what applications it can run. Application developers, in turn, care (a) how easy or difficult it is to code for a platform, and (b) how many people that platform can reach. That’s why web/browser-based applications are growing so fast, and why non-mainstream OSes are constantly on life support.
Katherine
The other reason is simple: not every user on the face of the planet is you, me, or Ioa. If you look back in Linux Kernel 1.03 I think you will see my name. I was the guy who managed to get the direct pppd to radiusd auth working before PAM existed. The reality is that I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to turn something on and I want it tow work. I don’t want to explain to my wife, daughter or son how to navigate the system. And most of all, when crap DOESN"T work, which has happened several times even post OSX switch, I don’t want to be the one to fix it. I want to call someone and have them fix it.
A little history about me. I built an ISP in 1996 using slackware. In 2000 I sold out and went corporate. I was the linux/network/firewall/dot-com guy. By 2004 I was managing 300+ servers in a mixed Linux, Windows, Solaris, and AIS work group. With 6 guys. We were good. We still are but now we are “architectural oversight and implementation” specialists and we number 12. And I am the manager. Big deal. But when you are patching a few hundred servers, then you come home to “Hubby, I can’t get past the vmlinuz missing message” you start to look for alternatives. I tired to get service support for a laptop or desktop with linux, but the yearly subscription was more than the purchase price of a non-linux system (which I would have to purchase anyway). Known my simple distaste for Redmond I opted for the comfort of commercially supported BSD that we call OSX.
Most here will tell you there is more than that, and it is true. But for this conversation that is the most important info. Give me a fully supported hardware/OS/software platform based on linux and I will consider it.
Full disclosure-- I run an ubuntu distro for my work on Atmel micro-contronllers. It is very close to what I need to see linux as a real CONSUMER OS.
Last point. I started this thread and it was intentionally apple specific†. Notice the self-discovery a few posts back. Apple represents an era of my life of great success and happiness. That era is changing into something unknown. It scares the living sh*t out of me. Linux represent a time in my life that I, in all honesty, wish to forget. I would do nothing over, but there is little for me, the inside me, to be proud of.
Hope that makes sense.
†[size=65]For the record, I think I am close to the king of OT’ing threads. I actually enjoy watching discussion develop. I am not complaining, simply pointing out that we started with an intentional discussion of Apple and hence … Allow the topic to wander. May our scribblings be of use.[/size]
Hrm. My response wasn’t intended to be an OS war. It’s deeper than that.
Remember when schools first got computers? For us, it was the Apple IIE (PR#6!) There was this shiny sense of newness, of possibility. Then when computers had a graphical interface, it was as if this huge frontier had opened. Now? I don’t get that sense of wonder anymore. If you think “Apple” or “Windows,” you have a real good idea of what they brand, even down to the smell in the boxes (for Apple). there’s nothing new anymore, know what I mean? (Well, perhaps the 3D chocolate printer. I want one of those.)
Such is the nature of breakthroughs. The same was true of the Model T, or the first steamships, or the first firearms. (Primitive as all of those devices were by modern standards.)
Now, the sense of wonder attaches to devices like iPhones and iPads, and to various aspects of the Web. It attaches to tools like speech recognition and gestural interfaces.
The leading edge has moved, and the innovators with it.
Katherine
Nor was mine and I apologize for the perception that was left. My response was intended as more of a personal “here’s where and why” of the thread.
Honestly, I told three people to “buy a $400 system from walmart not a mac” just last week. I tell folks to “use linux” quite a bit. I actually force some projects here at the office to hire all new development teams to support Linux because of technological intricacies that I just don’t want to think about (umm… 35tb of db using a 5 node cluster with 6-7TB data worth of transactions per day – MS wouldn’t even scope it).
I hate to think that I am above OS wars. I am just to lazy and cheap to have anything other than apple in my house right now. Remember that your time has a $$ value and the $$ value for my time is arrogantly high hence apple is cheaper than Linux for me
Make sense?
To the rest of the post – yep. Nothing new under the sun. But there are new ways to assemble this non-new things.
Anyhoo…
No OS-wars here.
But I think the real point is a total shift in the concept of computing. A fellow student in my college at Cambridge was the first person I met who mentioned “computer”. He was reading Computer Science or whatever it was called at the time, programming something the size of a house using a tape feed. One day in 1965 I met him literally bouncing down the street with something in his arms. I asked him what made him so happy, and he said he’d just succeded in getting his program on the university computer to run, and this bundle of printout was the result … a listing of all the possible combinations of the letters in the word “orchestra”, and he was on his way back to his room to see which of the combinations were words of English … he’d already spotted “cart horse”.
My first contact with computers came in the late 70s, using a BBC micro in the Polytechnic of Central London, and rapidly graduating to using it as a terminal on the UNIX server, printing out by doing a “cat” piped to a local 9-pin printer. A few years later, I was using a PC as a terminal on the VAX network using vi to hand code my handouts in LaTeX. I loved it, and then, when I got an original Atari Jackintosh, I installed Emacs, LaTeX and TeX, so I produced my handouts on that, to produce postscript files to transfer to the Macintosh SE with an Apple laser printer which had appeared in the Faculty’s photocopy room. Gradually, I started working directly on that Mac, basically the only person who used it, as I realised that I could save myself a lot of work that way …
Since then, although I still have hankerings to go back to LaTeX, and read the MMD forum with interest, I value my time, even when procrastinating, and an operating system that just gets out of the way and gets on with it is what I want. Windows doesn’t do that for me … and in various employs and circumstances I’ve had to use Windows, and I’ve always found it frustrating. Maybe it’s because the Mac system has become ingrained. I certainly don’t want, as an early contributor to the Linux thread said she wouldn’t want to be without, “a system that I have to beat into submission”. I read the forum, thinking, perhaps I should move over to Linux, it’d be like back to my Unix and Emacs days … and then I see what you’re all having to deal with with your various distros and think “No, I don’t want that!”
So I’m like Jaysen, really … though perhaps less concerned about where Apple’s going as I’m not as deep into things technical as him. Though what I would do if Apple really moved entirely to iOS … but perhaps by then I’ll be too old to really care.
But then, on the other side, there are those like me who have had some contact with computers since they became generally available — no I didn’t have a Spectrum, a Commodore 64, an Amiga, my own BBC Micro … and no, I’ve never learnt to program as I’ve had no need — but I do feel I understand a bit about what’s going on under the hood. However, the vast majority of people these days using “computing devices” don’t have that and don’t want to. They just want to have a box that is either good to look at, or not entirely offensive to them, which runs a system which does what they think they want, running the apps they think are important to them … and for the rest they don’t care, forget it. Linux doesn’t fit with that attitude. For that vast majority, it boils down to a choice of OS-X or Windows and increasingly iOS or Android; so it’s users of those that dominate this forum.
Then there’s another thing … this is the Scrivener forum. Scrivener started out Mac-only, so there are thousands of Mac-users; then last year the Windows version appeared and seems to have a growing number of users; then Linux users started trying to get the Windows version to run under Linux, and Lee kindly started making changes to enable compiling to a version for Linux, but that clearly needs a lot of getting it to work from the users … to which end you have contributed greatly. But very few Windows users have ventured outside the “comfort” of the Windows forum into the sometimes murky depths of other parts of this site, and of the Linux users, you are the only one that I can think of.
Mark
[size=200]BeOS and Brownies[/size]
/discuss
It could very well be that I’m not extroverted enough for the iPad and other smart-phone type devices. I like distance between myself and my computers, and the iPad bridges that a bit too much.
Actually there’s a new implementation of BeOS: haiku-os.org/
I’m still waiting on delivery for my 3D chocolate printer.
All those millions and trazzillions of, "Are you sures…?? jeeezz!! gorranedache now! 
I know what you mean, Mark. I love the idea of latex and mmd, but actually, they’re high-grade overkill for what I need. Hasn’t stopped me spending of time over the last couple of weeks playing with them, though. As I do every six months or so before remembering that they’re high-grade overkill for what I need.
I had an Acorn Electron (baby brother of the BBC B[1]), Spectrum, Amiga, several generations of PC[2] running Windows and Linux before settling on the Mac 5-6 years ago. I’ve tinkered with programming several time (am currently in a bout now, with Objective-C) but not that seriously… Basically it’s as fun as learning new languages, which I also like playing at…
And I just don’t understand how people can’t be fascinated by computers. But then, I don’t understand how they can’t be fascinated by history and physics and rugby and languages and golf, either, or why they apparently think that football is interesting. How strange…
David
[1] Pedant point apology: the BBC Micro came out in 1981, not the 70s…
[2] Unless you talk to my wife in which case it was the same one. (Well, it was the same case).
Fascinated by computers? I can understand that, though generally I think of them simply as a tool … which would surprise many in my environment who don’t know me too well and think of me as an Apple-evangelist — I now have a colleague and a friend both of whom will teach them the real meaning of Apple-evangelist! — and that the data on them is what really matters to me, not the hardware.
On the other hand, as a linguist — i.e. someone in the field of Linguistics, who also happpens to have a certain command of a number of languages, including Chinese — I find it hard to understand how one could not be fascinated by language, and further than that Cognition and Neuroscience. And then, I’m also fascinated by physics and astrophysics … I’m convinced that if I had gone to a different school, one which had understood me and what makes me tick, I would probably have become a physicist. As it is, I have settled onto the scientific end of the humanities.
Surely, the two most interesting questions in the world are, “What is the nature of the Universe and where did it come from?” on the one hand, and on the other, “What is the nature of our consciousness, and how does it work?”, onto the first part of which language surely[1] gives us a window.
Mark
[1] Lovely ambiguous word, “surely”! 