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Wherein I Respond To Elgin’s Pontification on iPhone’s Influence

Posted by Eric March on March 20, 2008 at 8:15 pm

Look, it’s fun to speculate on how this or that piece of hardware is so revolutionary that it will forever change the landscape of all that follows. Who knows, some of it might even come true. But when you’re playing Nostradamus with the future of technology, you might want to consider every practical angle before you start making your predictions, lest you be burned for a heretic, or at least mocked for being silly.

Unfortunately, I think ComputerWorld’s Mike Elgin needs to polish his crystal ball, because judging by his latest article on Why the iPhone Will Change the (PC) World Part II, I don’t think he’s seeing things too clearly. But let me start off with some good points.

You can argue all day long about whether the iPhone is the best phone (it isn’t), or if Apple designers invented these five UI elements (they didn’t). But over the next decade it will become increasingly clear, as next-generation cell phone, laptop and desktop systems emerge, that the iPhone was breathtakingly ahead of its time.

It’s probably not too hard to understand this point. Mike’s right: Apple didn’t invent the technologies used in the iPhone. What Apple did was bring several disparate technologies together and bundled them in one incredibly slick multifunction device that is showing the world just what you can do when you package good technology with great ideas and slick industrial design. The iPhone is the whole package wrapped up in a shiny bow and a nice card, and now that Apple has shown the world how these technologies should be done, much of it is going to find its way into future devices. But how much? Elgin seems to think that everything will work like the iPhone, and that’s where things get a bit crazy.

Next-generation user interfaces will have no use for a mouse. All that dragging and dropping, pointing and clicking, resizing and moving will be done directly with fingers touching the screen. Mice will go the way of the floppy disk, never to be seen again.

Mike. Baby. Think about this for a minute. There are two ways in which this kind of technology manifests itself: A vertical touchscreen monitor, like our current standards but with a resistive touch layer or glass capacitive layer; and Surface-style, laying flat (or angled like an easel) on the table beneath a capacitive glass top. You with me so far? Sounds sensible, right? This technology already exists and these are the forms it has taken.

Now consider the ergonomics of using these forms of the technology on a regular basis. I’m not talking about sorting pictures or fiddling with Google Maps with your hands while friends gather round and coo over your posh new bit of kit. I’m talking about sitting down and using this thing for hours on end for everything from graphic design to SAN administration, gaming to CAD, word processing to programming. Can you imagine keeping your arms outstretched, manipulating screen elements with your fingers, or alternately hunched over a Surface-type table doing the same for several hours? Can you honestly say that this would be a good use of technology in any modern scenario? Because I can’t. Not even slightly, though my chiropractor’s wallet might disagree with me.

The mouse exists and has existed for as long as it has for some very basic basic reasons: It’s easy to use, it’s accurate, and it’s comfortable. You can put them wherever your arm comfortably comes to rest and move the cursor around the screen with the greatest of ease. You can point with pixel precision at on-screen elements, an essential part of working with graphics or 3D modeling, and something touchscreens do not and can not have simply because fingers don’t terminate in sharp points. They’re comparatively big, sausage-like appendages that obscure several hundred square pixels at a time. You can cover a lot of distance with only short movements of a mouse through acceleration, which is also important both in every day mousing, and in gaming — also something touchscreens can’t do because you’re manipulating everything at scale.

Don’t get me wrong, I can see touchscreens as becoming a handy alternate input method, but there is an abundance of good old fashioned common sense that explains quite clearly why they will never replace the mouse.

Real keyboards will be optional, and on-screen keyboards, enhanced by haptic feedback, will replace the real thing.

Here, too, Mike predicts that keyboards will become increasingly virtual, with their physical cousins becoming occasional use things. Once again, there is a failure to understand basic ergonomics and the reason that the physical keyboards have persisted as long as they have — longer even than the mouse. Virtual keyboards are nothing new. They’ve been around as long as mainstream operating systems have had a predominantly graphical interface. Touchsceen keyboards aren’t quite so ancient, but they’ve been around the block a few times, too. Nobody uses them as their primary input method, and for good reason: There is no tactile feedback. You can’t feel the keys so you can’t properly type. The hunt-and-peck crowd might not be bothered so much by it, but those of us who touch-type can’t stand it. There are no keys to feel, no way to use your sense of touch to determine where your fingers are in relation to the keys or whether or not you’ve hit a key hard enough to register. That’s why it’s called touch-typing.

“B-b-but, haptics!” you say? That only takes care of the second half of the above equation, feeling when you’ve hit a key. It tells you nothing about where your fingers are in relation to the keys. On a real keyboard, any touch-typist will tell you, the feeling of the edges of the keys tell you when you’re positioned properly to hit a key. In some cases the shapes of the keys — keys like shift, tab, caps lock, and so on — tell us where our hands should be in relation to them. Haptics do not and can not address this. Touch typists will only ever be able to use a virtual keyboard if they have impeccable spatial and physical awareness. I’m sure some people do. I don’t. Nobody I know who touch-types does. So, virtual, haptic-enabled keyboards just aren’t good enough, and for that reason, they will never take first chair from the real thing.

As is currently the case, most users will gravitate toward laptop computers that most closely approximate the desktop experience. That experience will be all about hands touching a massive next-generation UI where more screen real estate will be more important than a physical keyboard. That’s why laptops will likely retain the clamshell design, but the bottom half will be all screen, just like the top half.

Finally, here is Mike’s take on future laptops which, if Mike had his way, would basically be big Nitendo DS units. I’m sorry, Mike, but: FAIL. Granted, laptops, being portable devices you can use much more comfortably on your lap or a table or wherever is convenient, are much better targets for touchscreens and virtualizing peripherals such as mice and keyboards, but while touchscreens are likely to be more prevalent, they will not replace the touchpad or keyboard here, either, for precisely the same reasons: Neither of the virtualized counterparts are nearly as convenient or easy to use as the real things, and they never will be because it is the very physicality of these devices that make them convenient and easy to use.

Human nature is all about convenience and comfort. There are some things that touchscreens, especially ones that support multitouch, will always be much better for than keyboards or mice simply because they present a much more natural and intuitive way of manipulating things that mirror the way we do things in real life. But not everything is best suited to this technology, and trying to shoehorn more traditional input methods into a virtialized environment just for the sake of virtualizing them just doesn’t work. We put up with it on the iPhone and other all-screen devices because they’re too small for real keyboards anyway, but when it comes to the devices that still dominate our daily lives — the desktops and laptops we’re usually around — some of the technology just doesn’t translate sensibly.

I have no doubt that the iPhone will be very influential in future designs for desktop and laptops, but I don’t think it will be in quite the way Mike is thinking. Let me make a few hasty predictions of my own here: Mice and keyboards won’t change much, and they won’t go away because they work, and if there were truly a better alternative to them, I’m sure they would have turned up by now. Touchscreens will become more prevalent if only because it’s cool tech and really does offer some great advantages with Multitouch — which itself will certainly become the next big thing in alternative (but complimentary) input methods, no question. Laptops will stick with one screen. I mean, can you imagine the battery drain keeping two active? That would have to be one heavy and bulky battery. Multitouch-enabled touchpads will see much greater proliferation in laptops, and it is likely we’ll even see the growth of such touchpads offered up to desktop users as an alternative to mice and track balls. Big boxy PCs may see a reduction in size as internal components get smaller, but they will never be replaced by all-in-monitor XPS Ones or iMacs because those devices are built for compactness, and their options for expandability are extremely limited. Hardcore rig builders will never opt for a device that can’t be loaded down with quad-SLI video, hex-core processors, 4 terabytes of storage, VFD multifunction panels, and water-cooling blocks.

Granted, my predictions don’t have that campy 50s “Amazing World of the Future” feel, but I’ll bet you dollars to donuts the reality will be closer to my predictions than his.