Apple's inevitable march towards an ubiquitous computer post-PC era

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Apple’s inevitable march towards an ubiquitous computer post-PC era

The term “post-PC era” has often been used in reference to Apple’s long-term business strategy, as well as the inevitable direction of personal technology. In the chart above, you can see how this technological change has happened. In the mainframe era, there was one computer for many users, the PC era is defined by one computer per user and now we’re already into the post-PC era, which is many computers for each user.

In some ways, this path is as logical as Moore’s Law. Look at the history of computing — from the mainframe era where there was one computer for many consumers, to the personal computing era where there was one computer for each consumer, to this new era where there are many computers for each consumer – and compare of the number of computer chips to the number of consumers using those chips. At its foundation, ubiquitous computing could be summed up by this simple principle of ratios.

The modern concept of ubiquitous computing originally came from Mark Weiser in 1988 from the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC (sound familiar?). The theory proposed a seamless, almost invisible connection between consumers and computers that would help drive a change in ratios from one computer to many people, to many computers to one person.

As Steve Jobs and others have pointed out, the post-PC era does not mean the end of desktop PCs in the same way that PCs didn’t mean the end of the mainframe. It’s just a difference in ratios. And it’s Apple, with Google not far behind, that is leading the way in changing that ratio— having multiple devices is only useful when those devices interact freely and openly with each other, and anticipate the needs of the user. I have an iPhone, a MacBook Pro, an Apple desktop PC, an iPad and an Apple TV. Some may say that would make me an Apple fanboy, but it’s way things are moving. Having that many devices works best when the user can seamlessly move from one to the other. From laptop to desktop to tablet to phone, Apple has successfully built up a tech infrastructure that makes that one user to many computers ratio possible. Google is quickly building this infrastructure with Chrome OS and Android and Microsoft is still behind for the time being, but they’ll catch up quickly with Windows 8, Windows Phone and the Xbox.

Even considering the most radical interpretation of ubiquitous computing dust, the main point has remained the same. We will soon be overrun by computer chips. There are, however, three very distinct platforms in this well-defined post-PC era that we have all become accustomed to. Not unlike the three platforms we see evolving within the iOS platform today:

Gesturing tabs: Mobile technology already had small chips, powerful batteries, geolocation services and wireless networking. But that was not enough to win over the masses and drive us all to purchase multiple computing devices. It was the way consumers interacted with these smaller devices that needed to change. For a long time, it was thought that voice recognition was going to propel us into the next era of computing, but that never happened.

Leveraging the fact that there were approximately 100 million iPod users, Apple was able to use convergence to its advantage as it introduced these iPod users to a series of simple touch-based gestures on a nearly buttonless device. In the early years of the iPod, we all were trained on the scroll wheel. With touch-based gestures on a wide open screen, this paradigm was taken one step further. Just as the mouse accompanied the transition from the terminal-based Mainframe Era to PC era, the post-PC era was ushered in by a new way of interacting with other computer chips, touch.