Love this:
Twenty years ago, you expected a phone to be provided everywhere you went, and that phone worked the same everywhere. At a friend’s house, or a restaurant, or a hotel, or a pay phone, you could pick up the receiver and make a call. You didn’t carry a phone around with you; phones were part of the infrastructure. Computers, well, that was a different story. As laptops came in, people started carrying computers around with them everywhere. The reason was to have the state stored on the computer, not the computer itself. You carry around a computer so you can access its disk.
In summary, it used to be that phones worked without you having to carry them around, but computers only worked if you did carry one around with you. The solution to this inconsistency was to break the way phones worked rather than fix the way computers work.
My dream setup, then, is a computing world where I don’t have to carry at least three computers – laptop, tablet, phone, not even counting cameras and iPod and other oddments – around with me in order to function in the modern world. The world should provide me my computing environment and maintain it for me and make it available everywhere. If this were done right, my life would become much simpler and so could yours.
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