• Disposable computers
• Multiple computer gadgets for everyone, not just one
• Shift in power, as scarce technology becomes a commodity

Cheap Computers Means Disposable Computers

When I bought a fully-equipped laptop for $4,000 several years ago, I treated it like a precious, delicate jewel. Now I can buy a run-of-the-mill laptop, or an entry-level iPad, for about $500; at that price, I can afford to be a little more cavalier about it. If it cost only $50, I wouldn’t throw it away after a day’s use, but I might buy two or three of them (as I’ll discuss below). But for $5, or for $0.50, the computer truly becomes disposable.

This is not such a radical idea. Toward the end of the film-based camera era, Kodak began promoting the notion of “disposable cameras” — perhaps because so many amateur photographers found it difficult to load a new roll of film into the older, traditional (expensive) cameras. Kodak’s new model came with pre-loaded film; and when you finished taking the 24 images, you brought the whole thing into the neighborhood photo shop — with the expectation that you would get 24 prints in a few days, but you would never see the camera again.

As for disposable computers, I have to admit that my imagination is somewhat limited. The first (and almost only) thing that comes to mind is computer chips embedded in the packaging that surrounds the products that we buy — products which themselves might be consumable, or disposable, but which would still benefit from, say, ongoing quality control for freshness and safety. Thus, when you buy a carton of FutureMilk, an embedded chip tells you if it’s still fresh; when you finish consuming the milk, you toss the empty carton in the trash. Same thing with cans or bottles of FutureCoke and FutureBeer, boxes of FutureCereal, and bags of FutureTacoChips.

I think we’re also likely to see more “smart” devices that retrieve, store, and manipulate data about our day-to-day lives, as well as interacting with us in some useful way — but which have a limited, short-term “life span,” after which we expect them to “die” without making all of its accumulated data available to anyone else. We already have primitive versions of this with plastic hotel room-keys, and metro-cards that we “fill up” with electronic funds, but ultimately throw away. I suspect we’ll have a lot more gadgets of this kind, even if I can enumerate a bunch of specific examples.

Multiple computer gadgets for everyone

I was a child of the 1950s, and I grew up in a typical middle-class American household. If you looked in my closet, you would have found one pair of shoes. If you asked why I didn’t have more than one pair, I probably would have said, “I only have one pair of feet. What would I do with the other ones?”

Today, I have a couple dozen pairs of shoes. I have black dress shoes, and brown dress shoes; and I have a couple more pairs of (black) dress shoes that have thicker soles, so I can stand all day long when I’m presenting lectures and seminars. I have walking shoes, jogging shoes, gym shoes, and casual “tennis” shoes (which I don’t use for playing tennis, but for walking on the beach, where they might get soaked by incoming waves). I have leather sandals, and Teva sandals, and two or three different pairs of flip flops. I sometimes wish that I could return to the simpler life of my childhood, where I didn’t have to think about which pair of shoes I would wear … but that’s not the world that Nike and Adidas and Ecco and various other manufacturers really want us to think about very much.

Similarly, it wasn’t all that long ago that I had only one desktop computer — and it was in the office. Then I got a desktop computer at home. Then I got a laptop. Then my wife wanted one. Then my kids wanted one…. and now I have a desktop (with two large display monitors), two laptops, an old Acer laptop for those rare occasions when I absolutely must operate in “pure” Windows mode. And that doesn’t count the iPad or the iPhone, or the Blackberry, or the three old Palm Pilots gathering dust in a desk drawer.

I don’t even think about this very much, but I remember visiting some friends a couple years ago, and expressing surprise that the whole family shared a single laptop computer.

“Why do you think they call it a personal computer?” I asked.

The parents looked at me blankly. (The kids weren’t around.)

“Well, sharing a personal computer is like sharing … well, like sharing a toothbrush!” I exclaimed.

“Yeah,” said one of the parents. “We do.”

I’m not really sure if they were pulling my leg, but I could see that we had no basis for a conversation. And I’ll bet that if I had looked in any of their closets, I would have found more than one pair of shoes.

In my middle-class childhood of the 1950s, we also had only one car, one telephone, one radio, and one television (which didn’t actually arrive in the household until after I had left for college). All of that sounds rather bizarre in today’s world, because most of these items have become affordable enough that we can take advantage of our natural desire — partly pragmatic, partly selfish, and partly driven by the power of Madison Avenue marketing — to have our personal car, telephone, radio, and/or television.

And just as we shrug at the notion of more than one pair of shoes per person, Moore’s Law will make us feel the same way about computing devices. Why do I have two laptops, for example? Well, one of them is the ultra-lightweight Mac Air, with relatively limited power and storage; and the other is a heavier, 17-inch Mac Powerbook Pro, with the fastest processor and largest disk I could find. They serve different purposes, and I use them both.

Remember, also, that we have a number of other “gadgets” that are almost entirely dependent on embedded computer technology. I have five different digital cameras, which doesn’t even count the Blackberry camera (which I haven’t bothered figuring out), or the three obsolete cameras that gather dust on a shelf in my office, but which are still quite capable of taking excellent photos.

I justify the proliferation of these devices by the significant differences in features and functions they provide. But if you were to drop the price by another tenfold or hundred-fold — if, for example, I could buy a top-of-the-line digital camera for $10 — then fashion would come into play. I might want to take my red camera with me on certain days of the week, the green camera on other days, the blue camera on the weekends, and the old-fashioned black camera for “serious” occasions. If my clothes reflected an elegant, chic fashion style (which they don’t!), then I might want to have a dozen different laptops, so I could make sure that the one I took with me on any given day was color-coordinated with my clothes.

Shift in power

To help you appreciate how much things have changed, let me tell you a little about what the “business world” was like when I first graduated from college and began working in a reasonably successful, high-tech computer company. If we wanted to make copies of a paper document, we first had to get approval from a secretary; and then we carried the original piece of paper to the Photocopying Department. It wasn’t called the “xerox room,” and mere mortals like me were not allowed to operated them on our own.

Similarly, if I wanted to make a local phone call from my office, I could pick up the phone on my desk. But if I wanted to make a business call to, say, our office in California, I had to get that approved, too. And then I took the (approved) request to a switchboard operator and scheduled the phone call — usually a day or so in advance. It’s not just that we lacked touch-tone phones, direct-dialing, or area codes; we lacked the authority to use what was then an extremely scarce resource.

Roughly ten years later, I had a software consulting firm with roughly a hundred employees, headquartered in New York. We had a telephone sales department, plus a bunch of other people who had legitimate business reasons for calling clients and co-workers and business partners all over the country. We also had a few employees who snuck into the office at night and called their girl-friend in Puerto Rico, or their mother in Europe. So when we got the monthly phone bill — which was typically on the other of $20,000 — we went over every itemized call to ensure that (a) our employees weren’t misusing a resource that still fairly scarce and expensive, and (b) the phone company wasn’t overcharging us for all of those long-distance calls.

Obviously, the same thing was true with access to computers. Many of today’s IT professionals have no living memory of the days when mainframe computers were locked in sterilized rooms, and batch jobs had to be submitted well in advance — with appropriate approvals and authorizations if those jobs required more than a minimal amount of computing resources.

Intellectually, we all know that access to computing has changed dramatically: we’ve evolved from the days of the mainframe, to the PC, then to the laptop, and now to the mobile smartphone. But if you look at the politics and the “power structure” in many large organizations today, there is still a strong tendency to control access to the computing power that’s available for almost no cost at all. It may come from senior management, or it may come from the IT department. It may be justified by “security,” or government regulations that were written 20 years ago. Or it might be justified simply by the stern message, “We can’t afford to waste precious corporate resources.”

Ironically, we don’t even have to respond to these arguments, threats, and ultimatums (ultimati?) any more … because computing power is so affordable that we no longer depend on our employer. We can buy our own, and to a significant degree, we can decide for ourselves how to use it. You can impose all kinds of restrictions and controls on my use of “corporate” computing resources, but when I walk out the door at the end of the day, I take my iPhone with me. I carry my personal laptop in my backpack, and I go home to my personal desktop, where I access the Internet via my personal service provider, and get my personal e-mail from Google or Yahoo or AOL or any one of a dozen other providers.

And the power shift has just begun: as Moore’s Law makes computing more and more affordable, especially to people in developing countries around the world, the shift will accelerate.

It’s important to note that we might not always see this phenomenon taking place — at least, not necessarily in the short term. If we acquire computer-based technological gadgets from a monopolistic supplier, or an oligopoly capable of price-fixing, then we could find ourselves paying the same price for our gadgets, even though the manufacturer’s costs were steadily dropping in Moore’s-like fashion.

Or we could find, as is so often the case with our home PC’s, that the new products that we’re offered each year cost more-or-less the same as last year’s model … but it’s twice as fast, or has twice as much disk storage. This is particularly likely to be the case if the manufacturer has managed to get the price of its product down to a psychological threshold like, say, $500.

But in the long run, these are exceptions. The fact of the matter is that I have computing power on my desktop that would have cost millions, or even tens of millions, of dollars when I started my career in the computer field. There’s more computing power in my super-cheap digital wristwatch than there was in the minicomputer on which I laboriously coded a FORTRAN math library for DEC in the good old days. And the list goes on …

Okay, so what does this mean — in terms of how we might expect to use computer technology in the future? I think there will be four main consequences:

• ubiquitous computing
• disposable computers
• multiple computer-driven gadgets per person, rather than just one
• shifts in power/control, as scarce items become commodities

I’ll discuss ubiquitous computing in today’s blog, and will move on to the other aspects of cheaper computers in the next couple of days.

Ubiquitous Computing

If the cost of computer technology does continue to drop, then we shouldould expect to see cheaper prices in the marketplace, and thus a much larger potential market for computer-based products. And there’s a related benefit — economies of scale, with mass production of millions of units — that I don’t really know how to quantify. But it ultimately leads to a phenomenon often described as ubiquitous computing — i.e., everyone has a computer.

To some extent, we’re not too far away from that phenomenon, even today. In 2008, the Gartner research firm estimated that the number of installed PCs worldwide had passed 1 billion units, and that it would reach 2 billion by 2014 (see “Gartner Says More than 1 Billion PCs In Use Worldwide and Headed to 2 Billion Units by 2014“). In a slightly more conservative estimate, the Forrester analyst firm estimated in 2009 that the worldwide installed base would hit 1 billion by the end of 2010, and that it will rise to 2 billion by 2015 (see “PC numbers set to hit 1 billion: and 2 billion mark in sight by 2015“). Obviously, that’s not everyone in the world; but it does suggest that one out of three people in the world will have a laptop or desktop within five years.

For those of us in the advanced/developed countries, it’s easy to imagine this trend continuing, for we continue to see computers in our neighborhood electronics/appliance stores for more and more affordable prices — e.g., prices that drop from $2,000 to $1,000 and now down to $500 or even $300. A more ambitious project is known variously as the “hundred dollar laptop” or the “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) project, hopes to persuade governments of developing nations around the world to buy hundreds of thousands of these inexpensive general-purpose laptop computers, so that every school-age child can indeed have one for his or her own. As of last year, the purchase price of the OLPC computer was actually closer to $188; but a 2nd-generation machine is scheduled to be released sometime later in 2010, with a price reduction down to $75 (along with a reduction in power consumption from 4 watts to one watt!).

Meanwhile, more and more people are suggesting that laptops/desktops may not be the platform of choice in the future. It might be a netbook/iPad device, or, more likely perhaps, a smartphone. Indeed, even an old-fashioned mobile phone like the Motorola Razr or some of the early Nokia products, could be considered computing devices. And while it’s estimated that there were only 11.2 million cellphones, worldwide, back in 1980, the number grew to one billion in 2002, 2.4 billion in 2006, 3 billion in late 2007, and 4.1 billion in early 2009 (see “Cell Phones and Globalization” and “Nice talking to you … mobile phone use passes milestone” or the sources of these estimates). That’s somewhat more than half of the global population — and while we may never reach the level of 100% market saturation, it’s not unreasonable to imagine that we’ll reach the 90% level within the next 5-10 years.

Of course, the “ultimate” limit in cost reduction is zero — i.e., free computing devices. We already have numerous examples of free information (e.g., Wikipedia), free software (open-source software, and most of the tools and apps from the Web 2.0 community), and many people may believe that their mobile phones are free. But there are at least two well-known business models that make these two examples possible. One such model, which we see primarily with free software is the advertising-based approach, where consumers are subjected to commercial advertisements. The other common model, exemplified by the mobile-phone example, is one in which the “razor” is free, but the “razor blades” cost money.

One last point before I wrap up today’s blog: even if a computing device is free, or even if it has a modest cost of a dollar, it’s likely to be used for entirely different purposes by a poor customer in a developing nation, than it will be used by a middle-class or prosperous customer in an advanced/developed nation. The region where mobile-phone usage is growing the fastest, for example, is Africa. But you’re likely to see much more usage in Africa, India, and other such regions for health-care issues and “basic” economic issues than, say, the U.S. market — where, for example, a predominant percentage of the iPhone apps are games, or some form of entertainment and amusement.

Let’s start with the dimension of speed (I’ll discuss the other dimensions in separate blog postings in the next few days). I just peeked at the details of the desktop Mac that I’m using to write this blog; it says I’ve got a 2.8 GHz Intel Core Duo processor. If Moore’s Law means that in the year 2015 I’ll be using a 28 GHz Intel “Core 20″ processor, does that mean Microsoft Word will run 10 times faster, or that Excel will “crunch” the numbers in my expense-account spreadsheets 10 times faster? And if it did, would I care? Would I even notice?

There is considerable skepticism on this point, and it’s something that most of us have observed since the introduction of the PC and the growth of the business/consumer software industry. We often refer to it as “bloatware” — i.e., the tendency of software product companies to add enough new features and GUI “bells and whistles” to soak up all of the additional CPU power in the latest laptop and desktop computers. Indeed, just as there is Moore’s Law to provide a long-term, optimistic view of the future of hardware technology, there is also Wirth’s Law, formulated by software guru Niklaus Wirth in 1995, which says, “Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.” And in 2009, Google’s Larry Page suggested a variation called Page’s Law, the tendency of software to get twice as slow every 18 months.”

While there are undoubtedly some exceptions (none of which I can think of right now), I think it’s fair to say that very few consumer applications are CPU-bound. No, I don’t need Microsoft Word to run 10 times faster; and no, I don’t need to have Google retrieve a million “hits” in 13 microseconds for one of my search queries.

On the other hand, business applications are CPU-bound … at least in some cases. That’s probably an over-simplification, since a typical business application uses a combination of CPU number-crunching, as well as RAM memory, disk storage, transmission of data through I/O channels, transmission of data across telecommunications networks, and goodness knows what else. But to the extent that CPU power is the critical resource, we can appreciate how important it might be for tomorrow’s faster processors to help businesses keep up with the massive volume of transactions that must be processed in “batch mode” during each 24-hour day, as well as helping businesses process “real-time” transactions with an acceptable response time.

Even though this may be important, I can’t help feeling that it represents the kind of “incremental” improvement that won’t represent a dramatic change. On the other hand, I can imagine the possibility of tomorrow’s entrepreneurs looking for new business models to take advantage of the tenfold-increase in computing power. We’ve already seen one example of this in the music business: in the “old days,” I would usually hesitate before deciding to spend $14.99 to purchase an entire album of music (regardless of whether the album was “burned” onto vinyl, or a tape cassette, or a CD). But with digital music and iTunes, I hardly hesitate at all to spend $0.99 to download an individual song; indeed, the “resistance” to such a transaction is so minor that it wouldn’t surprise me if I carried out 20 such transactions, and spent $19.80 to buy 20 individual songs.

What if a future business organization came along and offered me the chance to download and play a song once for $0.10 … or maybe even $0.01? If I became obsessed with the song for a day or two (as indeed I do, sometimes), I might be tempted to click a button, time after time after time, on my future iPod, and play the song over and over and over again. If you scale this up to a marketplace of, say, 100 million music-loving teenagers, then you’d better have a lot of CPU power to handle that kind of transaction load.

In addition to future scenarios where a moderate amount of computing power has to be applied to a qualitatively greater number of transactions, we’ve got a list of more “traditional” compute-intensive problems that would be greatly assisted by 10-fold and 100-fold improvements in CPU power. These include such things as weather forecasting — wouldn’t it be nice if weather forecasters really could tell us whether it’s going to rain next weekend? More important, wouldn’t it be nice if weather forecasters could provide an accurate, credible warning about the path of an approaching hurricane, or the arrival of a deadly tornado, a day or two in advance?

In addition to weather forecasting, there are also compute-intensive problems in biomedical research, computational genetics, artificial intelligence, as well as grim areas like nuclear weapons research. As an InfoWebLinks website observes, one good place to start looking for compute-intensive problems is to look at the various supercomputer centers around the country — and they’ve got links to six such centers, so that’s a good place to start.

Not too long ago, the modest computer on my desk would have been considered a supercomputer. So, one of the important “dimensions” of future advances is that computing problems that used to require special, multi-million dollar supercomputers — of which there were perhaps only a dozen in the world — can now be carried out on a modest budget, on anyone’s home computer.

But those supercomputer centers are still out there, and they’ve still got multi-million dollar machines that none of us could afford on our own. And there are still problems out there that we simply can’t solve today, because we don’t have enough CPU cycles. Sometimes we can combine the computing power of thousands of separate machines, as is being done with the SETI Project; but there’s no doubt in my mind that we’ll find useful things to do with all of the CPU/speed improvements promised by Moore’s Law for at least the next decade, and probably far beyond that.

Indeed, this has been true since the introduction of the first behemoths at the end of World War II, and certainly all through the 1950s. But much of our thinking about this phenomenon can be traced back to a paper that appeared in Electronics magazine, on April 19, 1965 — which was titled, “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits,” written by a 36 year old Intel engineer named Gordon Moore. The basic thesis of the article was that a trend had been underway since the invention of the integrated circuit (IC) in 1958, and would probably continue for quite some time, in which the number of transistors that could be placed on an IC would double approximately every … well, 18 months or 20 months or 24 months, depending on whose recollection you listen to.

In the paper, Moore predicted that the “doubling” trend might well continue for another ten years; but it has actually continued to the current day, and a vintage-2005 paper (“New Life for Moore’s Law“)suggests that it may continue for another ten years, i.e., until the year 2015. In 2008, Intel predicted that the trend would actually continue through 2029 (see “Moore’s Law: ‘We See No End in Sight,’ says Intel’s Pat Gelsinger“). And futurists like Ray Kurzweil have suggested that even if improvements to transistor-based technology does hit physical limits, technology will continue advancing with new approaches such as optical or quantum computers.

Whether improvements do indeed continue that far into the future is beyond my ability to predict; at least for now, I’m content with the idea of Moore’s Law continuing for another five or ten years. If indeed the technology doubles every 1.5 years, then we get three consecutive doublings — i.e., a factor of 8 improvement — in 4.5 years, or (in very rough terms) a 10-fold improvement in 5 years. By the same logic, we’ll have a 100-fold improvement in 10 years.

There’s an aspect of this that I’ll discuss in more detail in future postings, but I’ll summarize it here: a 10% improvement is “incremental” and doesn’t motivate us to make fundamental changes in the way we do things (unless it continues year after year, and leads to a “compounded interest” effect). But an order-of-magnitude improvement is a qualitative change.

For example, if I told you that the new car you’re going to buy next year will cruise at a 10% faster speed than this year’s, or that its average gas mileage will be 10% better, chances are you would just yawn. But if I told you that instead of cruising at 60 mph, you could cruise at 600 mph, you’d agree that it’s a whole new ballgame (the fact that our existing highway infrastructure couldn’t handle cars traveling at 600 mph is a limitation that we’ll discuss later).

It’s also important to remember that we see these improvement in several different “dimensions”: CPU speed, memory capacity, size (footprint), network capacity, and cost. Some of these dimensions are combined — i.e., today’s computers are dramatically faster and smaller and cheaper, and with dramatically larger amounts of storage capacity. But each dimension on its own is important, and needs to be considered on its own.

We’ll begin doing that in the next installment of this blog series — by looking at the consequences of computing technology that’s an order of magnitude faster in five years, and 100 times faster a decade from now.

Some IT organizations might react to this by saying, “Sounds like business as usual.” Because of the recession, or because of the accounting department’s way of handling capital investments, they might well be stuck with the current generation of hardware technology for another 5 years, whether they like it or not. And it could well take them five years to accomplish all of the new systems, and improvements on old systems, that they had in mind when they first acquired their latest batch of hardware.

Conversely, some IT organizations might acquire brand new, latest-and-greatest hardware technology, and experience no improvements at all. They might find that they’re still doing the same old thing they were doing five years ago, just a little faster. The text editor that I’m using to write this blog post, for example, would have run just as well on the laptop that I bought in 2005 as it does on the new laptop that I’m using today. If the response time for certain activities that I carry out with the editor is 5 milliseconds instead of 10 milliseconds, who would even notice?

You could also make the argument that if our hardware technology remained static for the next 5-10 years, while our needs and desires continued to grow, we would find a way to accomplish those needs and desires with software, or by reengineering our business processes. Or to put it another way: we often forget what amazing things we did in the distant past, using technology that we would consider primitive today. We landed a man on the moon more than 40 years ago, using mainframe technology and onboard computers that were several orders of magnitude less powerful than the technology inside our mobile phones today.

On the other hand, we could also compile a long list of things that would not have been possible if we had not achieved the remarkable improvements in hardware technology that have taken place all through my adult life. When I first started working in the computer field in 1964, I was told by my boss that I was among the lucky few who would be programming the PDP-5 minicomputer — a box about the size of a standard refrigerator, with approximately 6K bytes of memory, and paper tape as the primary form of external storage; it had less computational power than the digital watch I’m wearing today. If you had asked me to program the kind of applications that we all take for granted today, I would have suggested that you commit yourself to the nearest insane asylum.

So, while hardware advances may not be the only way to enhance the future of IT, and while they cannot even guarantee that future IT systems will be better than what we have today, they are obviously an important element in the equation. I’ll begin looking at this in the next blog posting, by paying tribute to Moore’s Law; and then we’ll look at the likely consequences of future improvements in CPU power, memory/storage capacity, cost of hardware, “footprint,” and networking technology. Stay tuned…

I don’t remember any significant improvements in the 1980s, but by the early 1990s, it was barely possible to communicate via e-mail in most civilized countries around the world. It required a low-speed acoustic coupler/modem, or a phone cord with RJ-11 jacks if you were traveling to a really advanced country. CompuServe was a godsend, because it provided local access numbers in every country that I was likely to visit. And there was a shareware program that interfaced with CompuServe in such a way that you could “batch” your email uploads and downloads, making it possible to send and receive dozens of (text-only!) messages in a matter of a minute or two. This wasn’t necessary to minimize telecommunication charges per se, but rather because CompuServe was charging for its access, by the minute.

Today’s Facebook generation is unaware of all of this, except perhaps for some dim childhood memories of their parents screaming at the telephone while trying to connect their primitive laptop computers (I once lugged a KayPro computer all the way to Australia and back) to the so-called Internet from a hotel room in Rio de Janeiro. Now we’ve got mobile phones that work in both North America and Europe, and we’ve found telecommunication carriers that make it possible to call home and say “hi” to the family for a few minutes, without taking out a second mortgage on our worthless homes. We’ve got WiFi in our hotel rooms, though they’re still pretty expensive in Europe (15 euros a day, in my hotel here in Rome, where this blog is being written).

But ironically, things have actually gotten more complex in the last couple years — so much so, that I’m planning to create a checklist before traveling abroad again, to make sure I haven’t overlooked a few critical things. Why? Well consider what I’ve brought along on this trip to Rome: my Mac PowerBook laptop, my iPhone, a Blackberry, and a brand new iPad. Maybe it’s overkill, and maybe I could have left one or two of the devices at home — but there was a conscious reason for bringing each device along, and the “care and feeding” for each device requires some conscious attention.

For example: why bring a Blackberry? Simple: my T-Mobile carrier has an economical $19.95/month plan for unlimited e-mail activity when out of the country. It’s pro-rated, based on many days you actually need the service, so I simply call T-Mobile and tell them, “Turn on the international service on day X, and turn it off on day Y.” Normally I hate the Blackberry as an email device, because (for reasons not worth explaining in details here), the messages don’t go through my normal “filtering” rules to eliminate spam and garbage mail. But it’s better than paying a king’s ransom to get my email on my iPhone when abroad.

iPhone users might ask: why not connect your iPhone to the Internet via a WiFi hotspot, and avoid ATT charges completely? Well, that’s fine if you have a WiFi connection — but if you’re out on the streets of Rome, or attending a conference in some random hotel in Rome, chances are that you don’t have a WiFi connection. And while ATT does make it possible to use its 3G cellular connection while abroad, it really does cost a fortune — as I discovered after running up $500 in charges with my iPhone during a one-week vacation in the Caribbean a year ago. So the Blackberry, with T-Mobile’s service, is essential for e-mail.

But of course, that means you have to re-route your email from wherever it normally goes, to the Blackberry e-mail address. That’s easy to do, and in my case it requires checking one simple box on a Web page where all of my email preferences are configured. But if you forget to do it, as I did at the beginning of this trip, none of your email gets sent to the Blackberry. It was a minor nuisance, rectified as soon as I checked into my hotel, and connected my laptop to the Internet via the hotel’s (expensive!) WiFi system … but still a nuisance.

Meanwhile, you’ve got to ensure that any email that normally gets sent to your iPhone isn’t going to trigger AT&T’s expensive international charges. That requires turning off “data roaming” (so the iPhone doesn’t try to grab onto whatever local telecommunication carrier it can find in Rome) and also turning off “push” notifications (so that CNN will stop sending me “news flashes” that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is even bigger than it was an hour ago).

That was fairly easy to remember … but now I have to remember to do the same thing on the iPad, too. It operates much the same way as the iPhone, in terms of the data-roaming and “push” options. Fortunately, I remembered that one just before my plane took off from JFK.

And then there’s the mundane stuff: each device has its own AC adaptor/charger, and its own cable to connect to the USB port or the iPhone/iPad port. Each device has its own adaptor for “foreign” (international) power plugs. The laptop and the iPad have different VGA adaptors if you want to plug them into an LCD projector for a presentation.

Oh, and one last annoyance: they all want to connect to the Internet via WiFi. But if you’re in a typical hotel room (either domestic or international) where there’s a per-day charge for accessing the Internet, you’re almost always restricted to a single device. I could understand that if my wife and I each brought our own laptop on a trip, the hotel would want to gouge both of us for the privilege of accessing the Internet. But I’m here by myself — and I want to use my iPad to read the New York Times in the morning, and then use the laptop for sending/receiving email, browsing the Web, and various other things. Or I want to transfer a spreadsheet or Powerpoint file (it’s actually Keynote on the Mac, but that wouldn’t mean anything to Windows users) from my laptop to my iPad; the transfer goes through iTunes and requires a “synch” with both devices connected to the Internet.

All of this is almost more trouble than it’s worth. I sure don’t want to go back to the ugly era of communication via telegram, but I’m beginning to wonder if we were actually better off in the days of low-speed, text-only communication via CompuServe. Unfortunately, CompuServe is just a dim memory. For better or worse, we’re marching into a brave new world with all of our beeping, blinking, more-or-less interconnected devices…

1. Perhaps most important: it has not yet, after a mere one week, become a “game-changer.” I have not yet found a mind-boggling, innovative app that makes me think, “How on earth did I ever survive before the iPad came along?” That’s okay; I also don’t recall being struck by a bolt of lightning a week after purchasing my first iPod or my first iPhone. I’ve got an open mind, and I’m willing to be patient…
2. A minor variation on the above point: because it doesn’t fit in my pocket, I can’t guarantee that I’ll always have it with me when I leave my house. I also don’t carry my laptop (not even my ultra-light Mac Air) with me whenever I leave the house; but I do carry my iPhone in my pocket, and there’s a 99% chance that I’ll have at least a compact point-and-shoot digital camera with me (not counting the mediocre camera built into the iPhone). Because the iPad does have a lot of commonplace uses (e.g., reading a book or newspaper), it’s more likely — but not guaranteed — that I’ll leave the house with a backpack, and the iPad will be in one of the compartments. (Note: women have purses, so it’s less of a problem for them. I’ll be curious to see if men’s fashion/styles change, with larger pockets in future sportcoats and even pants, so that we can stuff the iPad into our clothes.)
3.  I’m oh-so-glad that I waited an extra month, and got the 3g version; while I’ve got a good WiFi connection in my home/office, at least half of my usage of the iPad so far has been outside, wandering around Manhattan, in places where there was no WiFi. Ironically, things will be different when I’m in Rome next week, because ATT’s international data-roaming charges would bankrupt me … but here in the U.S., I want to be sure that I can connect my iPad to the Internet regardless of where I am.
4. Initial setup and synching of “stuff” from my iPhone to iPad was simple, straightforward, and fast. Of course. I expected nothing less. But I will admit that I was pleasantly surprised at how seamless the synching has been after the initial launch: my calendar, contact list, browser bookmarks, and email are all synched automatically, all the time, on my desktop, laptop(s), iPhone, and iPad. That’s cool.
5. I’ve also synched several photo albums with my desktop computer, which I never bothered to do on the iPhone. The larger iPad screen makes color photos dazzling to look at; and it’s a great thing to show off when strangers see my iPad and ask, “What can it do?”
6. I was surprised to see how few “native” iPad apps exist at this point — I read somewhere that there are only about 5,000 iPad apps, compared to 150,000 iPhone apps. Yes, you can run those iPhone apps in their original iPhone-size fashion, and then use a “2x” zoom button to make them fill up the screen … but it looks pretty crude.
7. On the other hand, the apps that have been redesigned for the iPad’s larger screen are slick and dazzling. I’m not an apps fanatic, so my situation might not be the same as yours — but for whatever it’s worth, I’ve got a total of about 60 apps, of which 20 are “native” iPad apps. That’s okay with me.
8. I installed Apple’s version of Microsoft Office — i.e., Pages, Numbers, and Keynote — even though they cost $10 each. It’s perhaps somewhat telling that I have not had a single occasion to use Pages (word-processing) or Numbers (spreadsheet) yet; but I have used Keynote, since I wanted to see how some upcoming presentations would look…
9. While typing on the iPad is generally easier than on the iPhone, I certainly wouldn’t want to write a three-page memo, let alone the Great American Novel, or even this blog posting, on an iPad. I got the docking keyboard with a bunch of other gadgets and add-ons, and confirmed that it works; but I haven’t had a good opportunity to use it yet.
10. I think the most important reason that typing has been a non-issue for me (despite the fact that I touch-type at 80-90 words a minute on my desktop computer) is simple: the iPad seems more useful as a means of consuming content, not creating content.
11. To the dismay of Kindle and the New York Times, I’ve abandoned my daily exercise of reading the paper on my Kindle; and I’ve cancelled my monthly subscription to the NYT. Instead, I read a (free) “summarized” version of the New York Times on the iPad; and I’ll be happy to pay the monthly subscription fee whenever the Times has it ready for me. I can also read USA Today (free) or the Wall Street Journal (not free); and if I had any interest in weekly magazines, I could also read Time.
12. What has been most impressive about reading the newspaper is that it’s no longer a single-task activity: if I think a friend or family member might enjoy seeing an article, I simply click a button at the top of the page, and an outgoing email message pops up, ready to send off the URL of that article. If something about the article intrigues me, I can pop right over to my Web browser and track it down. Indeed, I fully expect that the full-blown version of the iPad New York Times will have all of the embedded hyperlinks that I already enjoy in the Web-based version of the newspaper that I read on my desktop computer.
13. Since I mentioned the Kindle, I should comment on what most people would assume is the real area of competition for iPads versus Kindles: the ease or convenience of reading a book. This is an area that I’ll have to defer commenting about, because I’ve only downloaded two books onto my iPad and have not yet begun reading either one of them. For the moment, the biggest difference (in my humble opinion) is simply the number of books available; I don’t know how long it will be — if ever — before Apple catches up with Amazon (Kindle’s owner) in this area, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a year or two. On the other hand, once Apple has a few hundred thousand titles in its inventory, and a “pipeline” that ensures 99.9% access to all new releases, it may not matter very much.

As for Avatar: I obviously haven’t been paying attention to the details, so it was a bit of a shock to see that while you can buy the movie (for $14.99) for downloading and permanent accessing on your desktop/laptop computer, you can only rent it for a 24-hour period  (for $4.99) on your iPad. Phooey! For me, the whole point of downloading a movie would be to watch it (or portions of it) over and over again, whenever I was in the mood … or to stretch a one-time viewing over a period of days, weeks, or months. So Avatar won’t be showing up on my iPad any time soon…So that’s my impression of the iPad, after a week…

Here’s a summary of the additions, changes, and corrections that I made in V54; for convenience, you’ll also find that they appear in red in the PDF materials, so you can see what has changed since V52 and V53:

1. On page 70, I added Google Maps to the list of Ajax examples.
2. On page 84, I added Google App Engine to the list of interesting products from Google.
3. On page 85, I provided a new (working) link and details about Zimbra.
4. On page 87, I added a link to IBM’s new “Bluehouse” product.
5. On pages 89-90, I added two new pages of details on the iPhone 3g.
6. On page 91, I provided additional details on CIsco’s acquisition of Five Across.
7. On page 132, I added a bullet point with a link to Nicholas Carr’s article on “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“

I probably won’t do any more updates for another week or two, but this should keep you busy for a while. Enjoy…

Here’s a summary of the additions, changes, and corrections that I made in V53; for convenience, you’ll also find that they appear in red in the PDF materials, so you can see what has changed since V52:

1. On page 6, I noted that the Michael Wesch “The Machine Is (Us)ing Us” video has now been viewed 5.6 million times, as of Jun 8, 2008.
2. On page 8, I added a bullet point indicating that while the “long tail” is not one of the main “Web 2.0 tools,” it is a “related concept”
3. On page 15, in the discussion of “risks of Web 2.0″ platform, I noted that the comparison between the Keynote/PDF version of this presentation, against the Google Apps version, was so bad that I recently deleted the Google Apps version altogether.
4. On page 17, I added a note to indicate that the chart showing usage of various technologies — including the Internet and Web 2.0 — was taken from a 2006 survey that had been cited on the previous page.
5. On page 20, I updated the Twitter example with a screen shot from my Twitter home page as of this morning.
6. On page 24, I updated the count of Twitter users to 1,811,515 as of Jun 8, 2008. I also added a new bullet point citing a Business Week article indicating that Obama and Clinton each had approximately 30,000 Twitter followers during their primary campaigns, but Obama used his more effectively.
7. On page 26, I changed the first bullet point to indicate that Zappos is a shoe-selling company, not a shoe-manufacturing company.
8. On pages 29-30, I updated the Dopplr example with screen shots from my Dopplr home page as of this morning, which shows that I’m in Rome, along with various other details about who’s in Rome, who’s in my home town of New York, etc.
9. On page 35, I added a couple of sub-bullet points about MySpace, indicating (a) that it’s larger than every other nation except China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia; and (b) that I had written a blog posting about this issue, titled “A United Nations Seat for Myspace?“
10. On page 37, I updated a note about Obama’s “Yes, We Can” video, indicating that as of Jun 8, 2008 it has now been viewed 8.0 million times.
11. On page 75, I added a citation to a blog posting entitled “Did Rails Sink Twitter?“
12. On page 80, I updated the first bullet point to indicate that the book Web 20 Design Patterns is no longer “forthcoming”; it has now been published.
13. On page 85, I updated a bullet point to indicate that, as of Jun 8, 2008, it was still unclear whether Yahoo would continue as an independent company, be acquired by Microsoft, or consummate some kind of marketing/advertising arrangement with Google.
14. On page 87, which discusses IBM’s activities in the Web 2.0 world, I added a note that IBM now has a Vice President of Social Engineering.
15. On page 88, I added a “placeholder” bullet point for the iPhone 2.0 that is scheduled to be announced/released on June 9th; and I also modified a bullet point to reflect my belief that Apple’s distribution of iPhone software apps via iTunes will represent an interesting example of the “long tail” concept.
16. On page 123, which discusses technology trends, I added a note to the bullet point asking whether computers might someday exceed human intelligence — noting that the June 2008 IEEE Spectrum journal has a special report, entitled “The Rapture of the Geeks: separating science from fiction in the technological singularity”
17. On page 127, I added a bullet point indicating that senior executives’ acceptance/non-acceptance of social networks & Web 2.0 will become a more and more significant differentiator; I also included a citation to a recent Wall Street Journal interview with Clay Shirky.
18. On page 130, I added a bullet point with a citation to another paper discussing the use of Web 2.0 in educational environments.
19. On page 134, I added a bullet point with the publishing details of Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations.

… and yet … and yet … I couldn’t help being tempted every time I saw one, every time I saw an advertisement, a billboard, a TV commercial. Maybe it’s the seductive power of Apple’s marketing, maybe it’s just a case of utterly irrational geek/gadget lust; but whatever the explanation, the reality is that I finally succumbed, about a week ago, and ordered one of the damn things. It showed up a few days ago, and it seems to be working fine. The big test is on Monday: I plan to take on my next business trip, which includes stops in Detroit, Bangalore, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. It may be a non-event, it may be a disaster, and it may be an entirely new and interesting experience. We’ll see …

My friends and colleagues are somewhat surprised and bemused by this sudden change, especially since I had been fairly consistent in my opinion that there was no rational justification for getting the skinny, sleek, lightweight, sexy, oh-so-cool machine. Interestingly, what changed my mind was a review by David Pogue in the New York Times, entitled “Can Blogger-Bashers Predict the Success of a Product? Unlikely.” What caught my eye was Pogue’s comment about trying to switch back to his existing Mac laptop, the five-pound MacBook (which is what I’ve been using as my primary computer. “After the Air,” Pogue said, “it felt like a piece of Soviet Army field equipment. When I tried to pick it up one-handed, I thought I’d break my wrist.”

For some reason, this really made an impact; I don’t know why, because I normally stuff my MacBook Pro into a backpack or briefcase, which I then sling over my shoulder. But I also carry a backup battery in the same case — indeed, not just one, but two backup batteries, just in case I should suddenly find myself on a 14-hour flight to Tokyo. And then there are the cables and adapters and assorted odds and ends, which probably results in a cumulative weight of something closer to ten pounds.

With the MacBook Air, there is no option of a spare battery: the existing battery is non-removable. I’m sure that will be a problem someday, but I have to admit that it’s been a couple of years since I’ve experienced the need to swap batteries. On my upcoming long flights from Detroit to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Bangalore, and Moscow to New York, I expect to connect my Air laptop to Lufthansa’s onboard AC power system; I may end up being disappointed, but at least for now, I’m willing to take the chance.

What’s most interesting, at least thus far, is that the Air computer has forced me to “clean house,” and just load/install the essentials; after all, I’ve only got a paltry 64 gigabytes of solid-state storage. That’s a big change from my traditional practice, when setting up a new laptop: I’ve normally taken advantage of a one-click option provided by Apple, which simply copies everything from one’s old computer to the new computer. All of the programs, all of the data — and also all of the preference files, all of the leftover temporary files, and all of the flotsam and jetsam of programs that I had installed, used briefly, and then deleted (but not “uninstalled”). Believe it or not, my MacBook Pro has over a million files on it; only a small percentage are really relevant for my day to day work.

I did order an external, USB-powered 250GB hard disk, and I also ordered the external “superdrive” that provides CD/DVD storage; that takes up some room in my briefcase, but it’s still much lighter than the 2 backup batteries that I used to lug around. And I’ve uploaded some secondary files to a0GB Internet-based storage facility that Apple provides with its .Mac service (for Apple fans, I’m talking about iDisk here). And most of my mail, which I now delete pretty quickly, is on the Internet so that I can access it from anywhere; and my 14,000-picture photo archives are all on Flickr now. So 64GB of storage may well prove to be more than enough; at the moment, I’ve got a little more than 30GB of free space.

As Pogue concluded in his recent review, “this [MacBook AIr] machine doesn’t make a great primary computer, thanks to its smallish hard drive.” But it may turn out to be the perfect traveling machine, especially in an age where mobility and portability are becoming more and more essential.

I’ll let you know how things turn out in the coming weeks …

I’m sure Steve Jobs couldn’t care less whether an individual geek like me buys an Air or not; and I’m not trying to shift public opinion, or persuade you to change their plans if you’ve already decided you will buy an Air. If it works for you, that’s fine; but if you’re still on the fence, wondering what to do, then perhaps my analysis/evaluation will be useful to you. Basically, I decided that while it would be nice to have a machine three pounds lighter than the “standard” 15-inch MacBook Pro, that wasn’t enough to justify all of the features I’d have to sacrifice. They include things like a slower CPU (1.8 GHz instead of 2.8 GHz); less RAM (2 GB instead of 4 GB); no optical CD/DVD disk; no Firewire port; no Ethernet port; 64-80 GB hard disk, instead of 160-250 GB on the standard MacBook Pro; no replaceable batteries; only 5 hours of battery life, not much more than the 3 hours one typically expect on a standard MacBook; and no PC card slot. One or two of these factors could be overlooked, or could be considered a tradeoff for the obvious benefit of getting a machine so much thinner and lighter; but all of these sacrifics, taken together, were just too much for me.

By the way, please don’t consider this to be an “official” summary or review of the Air’s features; I may have overlooked something, and I may have gotten one or two details wrong. If you really need to make a point-by-point comparison, check out an industry trade-journal review like MacWorld’s “MacBook Air: What You Need to Know.”

One of the items that hasn’t been mentioned very often is the PC card slot; maybe it’s not important to most people, but I find it invaluable because it supports the high-speed GPRS wireless modem that I got from Verizon. If you have access to WiFi, that’s great; but I frequently visit client offices whose networks don’t allow access by “outsiders” like me. In fact, even if they did, I don’t want those clients snooping at my email messages, at the Web sites I’m browsing, or anything else they might be able to find out. Also, when I travel on business, I’m reluctant to spend $10 a night to access the WiFi in my hotel room; nor do I want to spend $5-10 to access the “public” WiFi in airports, just so I can pick up my mail. And try accessing the Internet when you’re taking the Metroliner from New York to Boston or Washington.

Ubiquitous Internet access would be important for another reason, considering the Air’s storage limitations: if you don’t have enough room on your local hard disk to store all of your documents and files, then one possible option is to store some of the files somewhere on the Internet. There are more and more examples of this alternative today, ranging from email (Gmail, Yahoo mail, Apple’s mail, and others) to free and nearly-free server-based storage mechanisms like Apple’s iDisk. I’ve used up about 40 gigabytes of local disk storage, for example, to store my 13,750-picture photo archive with Apple’s iPhoto program. But for a mere $50 per year, I can get a “pro” account with Flickr, and enjoy unlimited storage for my photos. This is not an abstract theory; I’ve already done it, and Flickr hasn’t squawked even once about the massive number of photos I’ve uploaded. But if I can’t get access to the Internet, then I can’t access Flickr, and I can’t see my photos. Bummer!

This raises a related issue: you either need to be able to put all of your stuff on one computer, or you need a convenient, hassle-free way of synchronizing the information you’ve got on multiple computers. The obvious mechanism for such “synchronization” is, as discussed above, to put as much of your data as possible in one single place, on the Internet (and hope that it’s secure and backed-up, which is a whole separate discussion!). Another example is the use of IMAP-based, rather than POP-based email; I can get my email on my iPhone, my laptop, and my desktop computer with Apple’s IMAP-based mail program, and everything is automatically synchronized. Not only that, Apple’s .Mac service also synchronizes my browser bookmarks, my email address book, and probably a few other things that I don’t even pay attention to. It’s all great; but it depends on Internet access, and without that PC card slot on the Air laptop, there would be too many situations where I wouldn’t be able to synchronize.

Before the details of the Air were revealed, I had already started thinking about the likelihood (based on the rumors already circulating) about how I could cope with a hard disk that had only a third of the capacity of my current 250-GB disk. Aside from the Internet-based option discussed above, I had another strategy: I thought I would just get one of the many tiny Firewire-based external hard disks, and use that to store my seldom-used files (like the humongous iPhoto library); Iomega, for example, has a nifty 250-GB disk that’s about the size of a deck of cards, and it doesn’t even require a separate power adapter. But it does need a Firewire port, and Air doesn’t have one. Bummer.

In fact, even if it the Air did have a Firewire port, I was beginning to imagine a scenario where I’d have a whole separate bag of attachable “parts” that I would connect to the Air when needed: an external hard disk, an external CD/DVD optical disk, and an external USB-to-Ethernet adaptor, along with the micro-DVD adaptor, the remote-control card, and the spare batteries that turned out not to be available anyway. And I thought it was a little ironic that I’d be bragging to my friends about my nifty 3-pound laptop, while also dragging another three or four pounds of “spare parts” that I’d use from time to time. And the chances are that I would discover I left a critical one home, just when I needed it most …

Bottom line: if you’re a road warrior, or even a “normal” business traveler who might be away from his office for a few days at a time, you really want to have all of your “stuff” with you. Ideally, you’d like it to be built right into the laptop you’re lugging around. But if that’s not possible, then you need to have one laptop for “serious” away-from-the-office situations, and the Air, which you can throw into your briefcase, backpack, or purse, for those “quickie” one-hour trips to meet a client at lunch. But now you’ve got multiple machines, and you really do have to have a foolproof way of keeping them all synchronized; otherwise, you’ll find yourself dashing out of the office to show a client a great new Powerpoint presentation at lunch, only to discover that the Powerpoint presentation is still sitting on your “heavy-duty” laptop or desktop, back in the office … and the luncheon restaurant doesn’t have WiFi, so you don’t have any way to make a “remote” connection to the office computer to retrieve the file. Bummer.

Assuming that I could figure out a solution to the synchronization problem (which I’m not at all sure I really can do, at this point), I can imagine that it would be really great to have the lightweight Air machine, plus my heavy-duty, all-in-one, self-contained laptop. But realistically, I would probably end up using the Air machine only once or twice a week, during those one-hour lunch meetings when I really want to dazzle an easily-impressed client, and I really want to enjoy the benefit of a super-light three-pound machine. But $3,000 is a lot of money to spend for something you’re only going to use an hour a week; even the slower, low-tech version of Air (i.e., the one with the slower 1.6 GHz CPU and the slower, more energy-burning 80 GB rotating disk) is $1,800 (plus tax, plus shipping, plus plus plus). I’ve been able to rationalize and quasi-justify all kinds of computer purchases over the years, but that’s just too much.

What can we expect a year or two from now, if Steve Jobs shows us a second-generation Air? Maybe a faster CPU, and maybe more RAM; that would be nice. But if he found a way to quadruple the capacity of the hard disk, I would be seriously tempted. Figure out a way to add a PC card slot (or show me where to buy a GPRS high-speed modem that connects to the Air via USB), and add a Firewire port, and I’m sold.

In the meantime, I’ll be curious to see how many Air machines Apple manages to sell. I wish them all the success in the world — if only because that might help motivate them to do some more innovating, and give me my second-generation machine. But I can’t help wondering how many “serious” business computer users go through the same analysis that I did, with similar conclusions. And I can’t help wonder how many students and “casual” computer users will be willing to pay the steep price that Apple is charging for the Air technology — especially as the economy slides into a recession. I hope I turn out to be wrong, but I don’t think the MacBook Air doesn’t is going to be anywhere near as successful as the iPhone, let alone the iPod.

Let’s take another look a year from now, at the next MacWorld conference…

All of this, I should emphasize, is based on an hour or two of playing around with the machine; it’s quite possible that I may modify my opinions drastically after I’ve had more experience. Interestingly, I expect that I will get more experience over the next week or two, for a somewhat unusual reason: in addition to this first XO machine that I bought for myself (paired with another XO machine that got shipped off to a child somewhere in a third world country), I’ve ordered another XO machine (which involves yet another contribution to some other third-world kid) that I’ll be giving to my five year old grandson. He’s too young to spend much time focusing on the Web browser or the word processor, but I want to have a sufficient understanding of the educational software pre-loaded onto the computer to show him some things that will get him interested.

The reason I mention this is that there’s no way on earth that I would consider using the XO machine for my own work. The screen is too tiny — roughly five inches by seven inches — the keyboard is a tiny chiclet-shaped contraption, and it’s way too slow to support the kind of day-to-day work that I do on my laptop/desktop computer. But hey — it only cost $199, and nobody ever said it was going to be a replacement for a MacBook or a Dell computer. I’m not complaining at all; I just want to remind you that it’s not the sort of thing that a technology-savvy person in an “advanced” country is likely to buy as a “replacement” machine for whatever he or she was already using.

With that caveat, here are some initial impressions after I took the XO machine out of the box and plugged it in:

1. The computer is basically up and running within a minute or two. The only “setup” that it requires is typing in your name. None of the Microsoft nonsense of typing in a 16-digit serial number pasted on the side of the box; none of the usual legalese bullshit of accepting the restrictions of a 20-page license agreement that you can only read a paragraph at a time. No setting of parameters or configuration details or anything else — just type in your name, and you’re up and running.
2. The user manual is two pages long; one page shows you how to open the laptop (which was less obvious than you might think) and where the various ports are located. The second page shows you a picture of the “home view” and “neighborhood view” screens, which are roughly equivalent to the “desktop” view you’re accustomed to seeing on a Mac or Windows machine. More about this in a moment. But in any case, if you need more information (which I eventually did), you can find it on the OLPC website at www.laptop.org/gettingstarted.
3. The tiny screen is not backlit, which means you can use it outdoors. But unlike the Kindle e-book reader which I’ve now been using for a few weeks, the XO machine has a color screen. I have no idea what the screen resolution is, but it seems adequate for normal usage.
4. One of the innovations that I found interesting was the XO’s visual display of all the network connections within range of its rabbit-ears antennae. It distinguishes between “mesh grids,” which are local networks without access to the Internet, and “access points,” which may or may not be locked. It’s intuitively obvious to select which network you’re interested in; but the procedure for actually making the connection was not-so-obvious, and I had to read the directions on the OLPC website to figure it out.
5. Linux 2.6.22 is running under the covers, and it’s not too hard to invoke the command-line shell. The same is true, of course, on a Macintosh — and 99% of Mac users would ask, “Why on earth would you ever want to type Unix commands on your machine?” On the XO, I found it necessary to do so because I needed to find the machine’s wireless Mac address (sometimes known as the “network ID”), so that I could provide the information to my Airport wifi router; figuring out how to do that required a visit to the OLPC wiki, which has lots of helpful information. Hopefully I won’t need to tweak too many other things at the Unix level.
6. The keyboard may not be as small as that of a Blackberry — but it certainly feels that way. I doubt very much that I could ever touch-type on the XO, but a child with small hands might find it perfectly adequate. As for me, I was reduced to cellphone-style typing, i.e., one finger (or thumb) from each hand.
7. The XO doesn’t come with a mouse, but it does have a couple USB ports. So, just for the heck of it, I plugged in my Apple mouse; it worked at first, but after a few moments, the cursor no longer responded. Who knows if it’s supposed to work or not … I haven’t yet had time to read the details.
8. Without a mouse, your interactions with the XO machine (aside from characters typed on the keyboard) are accomplished with a trackpad; apparently part of it can also be used with a stylus, but I haven’t read the details yet. I should also read the details just to see what’s involved with the trackpad, because I’ve been having a very difficult time manipulating it. I had assumed it would be as straightforward and intuitive as the trackpad on my Mac laptop, but that’s definitely not the case.
9. The machine is annoyingly slow; but that’s probably just because I’m accustomed to using a fairly zippy 2.4GHz machine with 4 gigabytes of RAM. If you’re curious about such things, you can read the hardware specs for the XO machine by clicking here; it’s basically a 433MHz X86-class machine with 256 megabytes of RAM, and a one-gigabyte flash-memory mass-storage device (i.e., no rotating-disk hard drive).
10. The XO machine has a camera. I suppose that will turn out to be very handy for certain educational applications; however, I haven’t had the time (or interest) to play with it yet.
11. The XO machine comes with a ton of open-source software, including a Firefox-based browser, a PDF-compatible document viewer, a music synthesis and composition tool, an open-source word processor and text editors, a pixel-paint drawing program, a Gmail-based email program, a calculator, and numerous games; if you want to see the entire list, click here. For what it’s worth, I was unsuccessful at trying to play some YouTube video clips on my XO; but perhaps that was my own fault.

Like so many other technology gadgets, I’m sure that the XO machine is something that requires practice, experimentation, and study (which can be accomplished by reading or browsing the OLPC’s website, wiki, and/or FAQ material). It’s unlikely that I’ll have the time or patience to do very much of that, except out of intellectual curiosity, because the XO is so vastly inferior to my Mac (or most well-equipped Windows/Linus machines) that I can’t imagine using it on a day-to-day basis for “serious” work.

However, if I was a teacher in an educational environment where all of the students in my classroom had XO machines as their only computing device, I would probably have a very different attitude about it. And if I was an inquisitive youngster in a developing nation, I might well find the XO to be an awesome machine. So the comments I’ve made here should not be taken as an insulting criticism of what the OLPC team has done; given their strategic objective of building a credible computing device at an affordable $100 price tag, I think they’ve done a marvelous job. (Of course, the price isn’t really down to $100 yet, but I’m optimistic that it will reach that point within a year or so.)

What’s more interesting to me is to imagine how all of this will evolve over the next, say, 5-10 years. I’ve been looking at an old iMac computer that I gave my mother in 2001, and in almost every dimension, it’s approximately 10 times less powerful than the MacBook I’m currently using. If that same trend continues, then I can imagine the OLPC team building a vintage-2015 computer that’s either 10 times cheaper — i.e., a $10 computer — or 10 times more powerful. Or maybe a little of both: maybe a $25 computer with a larger screen, a couple gigabytes of RAM and 100 gigabytes of mass storage.