by Noah Kravitz, Reviews Editor

30 October 2006

Mobile Culture: What is a "Computer" These Days, Anyway?

Pocket Power
Last January as I walked the main floor at MacWorld San Francisco, I kept hearing the same refrain over and over from exhibitors, journalists, and consumers alike. "This is more like iPod World than MacWorld," they said - some with glee, some with annoyance, almost all with incredulity. I certainly felt it, too - for every Mac-centric exhibitor on the floor there was at least one iPod-focused shop, hawking cases or speakers or transmitters or all three. The iPod dock toilet paper dispenser I found in the far reaches of the hall really hammered home to me just how much of a consumer electronics-cum-media company Apple (aka Apple Computer) had become.

More recently I've been covering the cellular telephone industry over at PhoneDog.com and the deeper I get into the world of mobile phones the more I ponder the philosophical question, "Just what makes a computer a 'computer' nowadays?" Nokia wants us all to call their new breed of high-end phones "multimedia computers," out of respect for their jack-of-all-trades feature sets, and the proliferation of mobile Internet and location-based services certainly makes a strong case for the cell phone as pocket computer.

The answer to my somewhat rhetorical question is, of course, that virtually any piece of portable electronics from video game to WiFi sniffer could be considered a "computer" of one sort or another. Wikipedia defines a computer as "a machine for manipulating data according to a list of instructions known as a program," also calling computers "universal information-processing machines." It stands to reason, then, that iPods are computers just like MacBooks and Mac Pros are. And yet, there's this whole "Apple should lay off the iPod and get back to making computers" backlash in certain parts of the Apple community.

As you might have guessed, I'm thinking - and writing - about all of this with an eye towards a possible Apple move into the mobile phone market in the near future. That's a specific topic for another day, however. The broader cultural implications of the advances in computers over the past quarter century or so - and, specfically, those applied to the personal computer and consumer electronics market spaces - are nothing short of monumental.

From Nerds to Millionaires
The triumphs of computer geeks like The Steves (Jobs and Woz) and The YouTube Guys have been well documented with the financial success of the iPod and Web-based video sharing. Perhaps more important, if less celebrated, than those invidual acheivements are the attitudes towards computers that our kids have adopted during recent years.

Take me, for example. I'm 33 and graduated high school in 1991. When I was a kid, my elementary school had a single Apple IIe in the library and a few other personal computers scattered about the school for very limited and specific use. Not many of my classmates knew much about how to use the computers, and those who did (myself included) were prone to "geek," "nerd," and other derisive labels if we were too forthright about our interest in sitting in front of the screen for too long.

Fast forward fifteen years to this past June, when I wrapped up my fifth year of full-time teaching (I'm currently taking a break from working in schools). The social implications of having some computer knowledge have done a complete one-eighty, and I'd say most of that is owed to the Net and the iPod. As so many people have already said, today's kids are growing up online much as my generation was raised on TV. The kids who know how to fix a cranky iPod, find the funny videos on YouTube, or download cool ringtones to a cell phone are more likely to be thought of as "cool" than "nerdy" for their computer-related knowledge.

In general, I think this is great. Nobody should be made to feel badly about knowing things, let alone wanting to share said knowledge with their peers. More pointedly, this trend speaks to me about the enormously widened net that computers now cast in our cultural lives. While my students still thought of the eMacs in our school lab as "computers," and their iPods, cell phones, and other electronic gear as "iPods," "cell phones," and so on, the fact remains that it's all computing, and it all relates back together both literally and figuratively.

When I was in fifth grade, having computer skills primarily related to programming. By high school I began to see the potential in desktop publishing skills through my work on the school newspaper (which we produced using Pagemaker on a fleet of Macintosh SEs). College hipped me to the power of Email and newsgroups (I gave up Computer Science after struggling through the department intro course and majored in English instead), and my first adult job opened my eyes to the Web. Granted, I probably noticed all of these things a little behind the pace that most of you kept up. But still, I was on the nerdier side of the curve as compared to most of my contemporaries.

In the ten years and change since I earned my BA, the power of personal computing has literally exploded. I'll cite a single example: About two years out of college I answered a want ad looking for Filemaker Pro developers. I interviewed with a small consulting company that wound up hiring me instead to set up a Media 100 video editing system. The system ran about $4K (including specialized RAID hard drives) on top of the price of an upper-end Mac, and could digitize, edit, and output video more or less at S-VHS quality. The new Nokia N93 cell phone can capture and edit digital video at a similar resolution. It costs $600 and, by the way, is a phone.

What not very long ago was a speciality relegated to the fringes of our society is now commonplace, if not the thread that brings our youth in particular together. Used to be that only nerds used computers. Now almost everyone carries a mobile phone that also takes photos, plays music, and sends it all across the Net to share with other people. Used to be that knowing about computers made you nerdy. Now not knowing about them means you're out of touch.

iPods and iPhones
All of this isn't to specifically comment on the past, present, and possible future of Apple as a Mac or iPod-centered company, or even as a computer or consumer media company. Rather it's to say that computers have changed our culture dramatically in the past twenty-five years (in particular), and so it stands to reason that the culture of a computer company might also change as a result. Nokia is trying to reposition themselves as a maker of mobile computers featuring cell phone capabilities. Apple has successfully built a brand on a mobile computer that originally did nothing but play music.

I hope that Apple never loses its commitment to making top-notch personal computers that combine - to paraphrase Steve Jobs - three elements that the company excels with: Hardware design, UI design, and technological innovation. But I also hope they continually seek to apply their talents and experience to the new niches of personal computing that have permeated our culture. Mobile entertainment is one such area, and mobile communications is a second.

We all know what the iPod has done to the business and culture of mobile entertainment (not to mention Apple's bottom line) in the five years it's been around. Wouldn't it be fun to see what an Apple phone could do to mobile communications over the next five years?

* * * *

Get the best price for your new iPod at PCPrices/iPod