Here’s a great talk from Alan Kay: “Is it Complex or Did We Just Make it Complicated?”.
There are a lot of good ideas in there, but my favorite moment is when he sets his sights on iOS. He’s asked about running Squeak (a Smalltalk dialect) on the iPad, and goes on to say:
I’ll tell you what does tick me off. Two things. The number one thing is that yes, you can run the Etoys version of Squeak, but Apple absolutely forbids any child from putting a creation of theirs on the Internet and forbids any other child in the world from downloading that creation. That couldn’t be anymore anti-personal computing if you tried. That’s what ticks me off.
Then the lesser thing is that the user interface on the iPad is so bad because they went for the lowest common denominator. I have a nice slide that shows a two year old kid using an iPad and an 85 year old lady using an iPad and then the next thing shows both of them in walkers. Because that’s what Apple has catered to, the absolute extreme. But in between, when you’re two and three, you start using crayons and you start using tools. So Apple, despite having made a pretty good touch sensitive surface, absolutely has no thought of selling to anybody who wants to learn something on it. And again, who cares? There’s nothing wrong with having something which is braindead and only shows ordinary media, but the problem is that people don’t know it’s braindead, so it’s actually replacing computers that can do more for children, and to me, that’s anti-ethical.
We’re giving up for mere convenience without knowing what the absolute cost is. I blame Apple because they know what they’re doing and I blame the schools because they haven’t taken the trouble to know what they’re doing over the last 30 years, but I blame Apple more.
Some changes since the dawn of personal computing have been tremendously positive, like the quantum leap in the raw compute power or the vibrant displays and peripherals that we now have available, but not all are as encouraging. As suggested by Alan, the walled gardens that we take for granted on everything from our iOS apps to our browser extensions would have been abominable to early idealists. So too would the idea of diluting interfaces so that they’re universally accessible, but to a point where uisng them to be productive is hopeless.
We should be thinking about re-opening computation and rebooting our UX design to optimize for power users. We should be using computing to push humanity to new levels instead of constraining it to the lowest possible baseline. There’s still time to do so, but with the continued rise in popularity of locked platforms (iOS/Android) and the diminishing presence of the PC, the hour grows late indeed.
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