[helwr]

this is most visible in 20th century architecture, think of gradual elimination of everything external, ornamental, unnecessarily complex in order to scale.

A long way to simplicity: from Gothic cathedrals to Woolworth building to WTC

[Splines]

Is it happening in the computing devices world as well? Is the move to the iPhone/iPad a shift to simplicity?

It's interesting to note that your architectural example and Apple's devices are similar - the iPhone, to outward appearances, is quite simple to use. The innards however, are probably just as complex as any other modern operating system.

[Periodic]

The interface and outward appearance is simple, but the internals most certainly are not. There are still hundreds of components from dozens of manufacturers combined to make a physical product. In the case of the iPhone there's one of the largest mobile operating systems on there.

Computer chips are getting more and more complex as well, now with more levels of caching and inter-core communication.

I think we have a long way to go before we get simpler computers, but that does cause us to wonder if we will get to the point that they are just too complex.

[rbanffy]

> In the case of the iPhone there's one of the largest mobile operating systems on there.

Still, it's a lot simpler than a desktop computer - fewer parts, no moving ones... Splines' idea makes a lot of sense.

[pyre]

I think that he meant complex in terms of inner structure, not user interface. Many of the previous mobile operating systems were pretty complex (from a user interface level) even though they only had a limited number of tasks you could do with them.

[rayval]

Yes very good point.

Simplicity on consumption (user) side can require massive scale complexity on the production side.

iPhone is grandma-level simplicity to use, but hard to replicate by competitors (despite massive investment by Nokia, Microsoft, RIM, etc, they have not been able to replicate the iPhone user experience, an experience which goes beyond the device to the ecosystem of AppStore, iTunes, etc)

Another example is Google search, which from the user perspective is one simple text-entry box plus one graphic and 12 words of text on the page. But on the other end of the wire is a server farm of a million machines and rocket-science algorithms, software infrastructure and operational processes.

[jimbokun]

There may be a better case for simplicity on the server side. Sun made their original fortune from selling ever bigger and more complex machines, until people figured out they could get equivalent or better results with multiple cheap Linux boxes.