Noted OS X security expert Charlie Miller was in Vancouver for CanSecWest, the annual computer security conference. He was good enough to give me his time for an interview for Mac | LIfe, seen below….
Not as random a collection of words as you’d think at first glance. Scott Rosenberg of Salon fame has a post up on Silicon Alley Insider where he relates the excitement of Big Media over the incoming iPad as parallel to their clueless exuberance over CD-ROMs in the early 90’s. The web showed up soon afterward and the CD-ROM became a historical curiosity.
It turns out that nothing can compete with people connecting with each other around common interests. While the iPad will likely have some of those features, the Big Media hope of creating new walled gardens through apps is likely just that, a hope. Personally I would but a New York TImes or Wired app, provided the price was cheap enough and it took advantage of the platform in ways I couldn’t experience with any other medium. BUt I think there wil likely be quite a few misfires as big media outlets try, and fail, to turn back the clock.
Does that mean the end of the Ipad? I don’t think so. The tablet form factor is advantageous not just for reading media but a host of other applications, including ones we haven’t yet come up with.
It would appear that Apple is in fact looking to expand the iPhone OS past the iPod and iPad. To what purpose? Well, Steve Jobs did refer to the iPad as a “magical platform”, and maybe there’s more to that statement than just the iPad’s seemingly limited abilities. Maybe Apple is working on ways to convert their entire line of laptops to some hybrid of the iPhone OS, giving even professionals a new way to express themselves.
Or maybe not. After all, the iPhone OS is (at least at present) somewhat limited, and an application like Final Cut Pro would need a radical revamp in order to work in an “iPhone OS-ish” setting. But I’ve always said Steve Jobs is a lot smarter than I am, so we’ll have to see what Apple has in mind with this latest mysterious move.
Vancouver Sun tech reporter Gillian Shaw interviewed myself and several other technology enthusiasts on the day of the Apple iPad announcement, and you can check out my thoughts online on her blog (as well as in yesterday’s dead tree version of the Vancouver Sun.) Techvibes.com also reposted “The iPad cometh“. Neat!