Computer as Appliance

When I first got into personal computers back in the late 1980s, they were still very much a niche product. For about a thousand dollars a geek could go to any of the weekend "computer fairs" that dotted the Bay Area and buy the parts to build a PC. (It wasn't until 2004 that I actually bought my first pre-assembled computer.)  Interchangeable parts were the norm, and if you wanted to upgrade your paltry little 8088 system board to a "blindingly fast" 286, it was fairly simple (if relatively expensive).

Back in the day, system boards were larger than a sheet of paper, and individual memory chips on those boards were still the norm. There was no such thing as integrated video, parallel or serial connectors on a system board. If you wanted any of those, you had to buy separate cards. Hell, at that point there weren't even built-in clocks! (I remember buying and installing more than one clock card over the course of assembling several PCs.) If you wanted to upgrade your RAM, you came home with a bag full of individual chips and prayed that none of them were bad, because tracking down a bad chip when you've just inserted 32 of the things was an absolute nightmare. (I can't tell you how happy I was when the first SIMMs and DIMMs appeared on the scene.) And if you wanted to run AutoCAD (which I did back in the day), you needed to buy a separate math co-processor chip.

Gawd, I don't miss those days.

Fast forward twenty-five years. Apple's MacBook Air and iPad have shrunk system boards to an eighth the size they once were and now include video, I/O and wireless. The amount of RAM has grown exponentially, and CPUs are packing more power than ever dreamt of in 1988. The Air and iPad have no moving parts (except a CPU cooling fan in the Air) and contain nothing that is user-replaceable. Spurred in no small part by the wild success of the iPhone, the idea of computer as appliance is coming to fruition.

When I remember the sheer number of parts required to build a PC once upon a time, I am amazed when I see tear downs of the iPad and the Air (click to embiggen):

In both cases, the biggest parts of both devices are the batteries.

And even if you don't consider them appliances, but simply as portable computers, compare them with this, the Compaq II from 1987:

My ex brought one of these home from work one evening in 1988 and we thought it was the coolest thing evah. I only wish he were still around to see how far we've come since then.

It all makes me wonder what the face of computing will look like in another 25 years…