[chernevik]

Today you can build a brand-spanking new computer for $800, less if you skip the fancy graphics card and speakers. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/guides/2011/03/ars-system-gui...

There may be fewer of these sitting around living rooms. But a greater proportion will be available to dual-boot as Dad won't be so worried about losing his TurboTax data.

The devices supplementing or supplanting them will give kids access to the entire library of human writing prior to 1900, plus an extraordinary ability to review art and musical history. They'll be one copyright violation away from K&R. They will essentially be dropped into the Library of Congress, with the Louvre and the Hermitage bolted on at one annex. In the basement will be the nightclubs of Harlem and the salons of Vienna. This is before anyone uses these things for anything _new_. And these contraptions are somehow _limiting_?

Nor will they remain closed. Proprietary tablet systems will suffer the same relentless competition that has grown $600 of desktop from pipe-dream to humdrum commodity. People and companies will code these things precisely to match the capabilities, and revenues, now locked away.

I get the philosophic distaste for closed systems. But haven't the past ten years demonstrated that, in a free market, they can't stay closed? Or that the revenues available to proprietary innovators can motivate accelerations in innovation? Worries about "closed" were one thing in 1995 when people thought they were doomed to Windows. Maybe it's time to adjust the anxieties for what we've seen of the long-term competitiveness of "open".

[fpgeek]

Plenty of people reference things like Apple's dominance of the tablet market and Apple's profitability compared to other device manufacturers and claim that "this time it's different". That may be famously wrong with respect to the stock market, but we have relatively few examples of the evolution and adoption of computing platforms so I'd say it is a much harder call here.