Freedom

I thought this was an interesting set of musings about the liberating feeling that comes with a true “personal” computer—a computer that you can do what you want, when you want, how you want—and how that freedom has eroded over time. I think it’s another side of the thoughts I wrote a couple months back about software product interface design. It’s the rationale behind why I can’t move to an iPad as my primary computing device.

Maybe because I lived through this — maybe because I’m a certain age — I believe that that freedom to use my computer exactly how I want to, to make it do any crazy thing I can think of — is the thing about computers.

That’s not the thing about iOS devices. They’re great for a whole bunch of other reasons: convenience, mobility, ease-of-use.

You can do some surface-level automation, but you can’t dig deep and cobble together stuff — crossing all kinds of boundaries — with some scripts the way you can on a Mac. They’re just not made for that. And that’s fine — it’s a whole different thing.

Later:

With every tightened screw we have less power than we had. And doing the things — unsanctioned, unplanned-for, often unwieldy and even unwise — that computers are so wonderful for becomes ever-harder...But if we don’t have this power that is ours, then I don’t actually care about computers at all. It meant everything.