Here’s an example. If I want to edit an image on the Mac, I simply browse to it with the Finder and open it with my preferred editor (usually Acorn). I can use search to locate the file or just hunt and peck. The applications don’t need to know anything about the location as long as it’s on my Mac. Applications don’t own files on the Mac, the OS does.
I don’t think iOS and mobile technology is a shift in how we get things done. I truly don’t believe that. The Mac is for getting things done. iOS is for looking at SnapChat. I feel strongly that users on mobile devices as their exclusive computing platform are 2nd class citizens not in economic levels or diversity but in the content they create and consume. I think camera phone photos look awful on my Macintosh and they can’t see the finer details of my full-frame photos on their 3” screens enough to appreciate them. To them, a DSLR photo & an iPhone photo look the same. They don’t experience the web and work and GTD like I do. They work at a slower space with finite performance power and finite content creation ability and they’re constrained. They sacrifice functionality for portability and that’s fine but I’m tired of defending the use of an iMac and how the iMac is easily twice as good as editing 4K videos as my MacBook Pro just as the MacBook Pro is 10x better at that task than my iPad. Not just in CPU cycles but in the interaction with my video via key commands, my trackpad, the I/O, ports, screen real estate and file-system.
I see the collective computing of billions of smartphones to be greater than the 100 million PCs that were in existence a decade ago but if you replaced those billions of smartphones with computers, people would be creating even more amazing things. As you’ve seen on this blog over the last few years, I’m digging my heels in more and more on three very closely related narratives:
1. Mobile computing is crippling our creativity
2. The Internet is a privilege not a right just like driving a car
3. The Internet as we know it is already lost to corporations and the people behind closed doors and there’s nothing we can do about it and because of #2, we as a collective are too dumb to play outside of 3 silos (aka websites) owned by corporations that have zero regulatory oversight that they play nicely and do the right things when it comes to leveraging our data to sell advertisements.
PS: The other day, I was on Reddit. A GIF had 20K upvotes and millions of views. I clicked it and it was a 100×100 pixel image that looked like a spec on my 5K iMac. I commented that I couldn’t even see what was going on in the GIF and received dozens of downvotes complaining about its size. I opened AlienBlue on my iPhone and clicked it and it looked better…good enough but not great and that’s the crux of it. Everyone on reddit is using a smartphone. To them, these crappy media files look decent enough and you can’t convince them of this because why would they look at Reddit on a 27” screen? If everyone had a real computer that could afford one, it would push our species forward because the demand for better written works, photos and media would go up. People would downvote a 100×100 GIF because it looked bad or complain that the GIF was 100 megabytes for no reason and demand the OP used an MPEG4 or HVEC instead and that the GIF had no audio track added and why would you post a motion video w/o audio? Sigh.