I should have left my musing about this in the article. But it didn’t fit.

But it *is* a huge drain on resources, it generates extra waste, and has the potential to make life more complex. What I want are loosely coupled devices.

There’s no reason not to share the HD between my music, my videos, my games, and my documents. There’s no reason not to share CPU time for most applications. (Except games and video encoding). There’s no reason not to share I/O.

Separation by components, and keeping the components and their interface simple is where the future lies. (At least I believe so)

And the technology is almost there – I can set up my entire household to communicate wirelessly, I can control most devices through a web browser, and so on.

In other word – multiple devices are good if we can avoid unnecessary duplication. (Let me just mention power supplies here…)

I think it’s fine for people who want a simple machine that works, they can buy consoles and be happy. Those of us who expect a bit more out of a device will stick with general purpose PC’s, thank you very much.

I am a huge fan of multi-purpose gadgets, however, when used properly. The PocketPC, for example, is an incredibly useful digital swiss army knife.

This assumes there is no intrinsic value in such special purpose devices, which I think isn’t true. If nothing else, the user interface on special purpose devices can be easy enough for anyone to use.

When one claims that using a tivo instead of a computer as a PVR is “more expensive”, remember to factor in the emotional and time cost of tech support calls from your mom every time she wants to tape “desperate housewives” but can’t figure out how.

I will admit that my “one machine for writing and one machine for surfing and one machine for music” is not really the ideal scenario. The truth is that the form of the simpler machines will be driven by the applications that people want for them. It’s not likely that said applications will break down along the same lines as current productivity applications.

As it is now, media applications and gaming are already starting to split off (tivo and xbox) into more effective “single application boxes”. I was just brainstorming about how this evolution might continue.

I find it interesting that Robert brings up the fact that not tinkering with the machine helps it stay stable. The logical conclusion of this is to make the machine untinkerable. Which is exactly what I was talking about.

When you think about it, one of the big reasons why the Apple machines stay more stable for people (although this is not universally true, I think) is because they are less tinkerable, not because Apple has some kind of engineering genius that evades Microsoft.

Having a special purpose device for everything is extremely wasteful – something we can hardly afford in a world were resources are unequally distributed and becoming scarcer.

And there’s no technical reason for PCs to be as bad as they are. Counterexample: The Mac. Plain works. I’m on a Apple laptop for three years now, and I had two crashes. That’s it. It’s just that they spend a lot of time making sure it works and is easy to use.

(NB: If you don’t modify the heck out of your PC it has a much better chance of working, too. So maybe the thing to blame is our incessant need for the latest and greatest toys, no?)