iPhone-iPad-iTunes-iBooks-iCloud.
Nexus-GooglePlay-GooglePlus-Gmail-ALLGOOGLEERRRRTHANG.
Kindle-AmazonPrime-AWS?
We have embarked on a world of post-PC mobility computing where we have silos. There’s still some overlap – you can get a Kindle app for damn near everything and anything with a processor, for instance, and your current .m4a iTunes files will still run on other players, and Google Maps is out there for your iPhone – but by and large, we’re sort of where we were in the pre-PC era, when you bought your computer from Apple or Radio Shack or Texas Instruments or Commodore or what have you. The difference being that now you buy not only hardware and software but a variety of online services and media content through the same silo.
I think to a certain extent, my desire to own a Nexus 7 tablet is pushed by the same impulse that led me to go out and buy that Dell netbook back in 2010. Something that came with a viable OS of its own but which could have other ones slapped over top of that (or in place of it). Something that would run an open source OS and not be beholden to anyone’s App Store, something that could sideload its programs and media and what have you, something to sort of provide that survivalist “in case shit” approach. Something, in other words, which would fulfill the promise of a European-style mobile phone environment where carrier and hardware are separate and combine it with a screwdriver-shop Linux world where you could bundle together your own hardware and have something run on it.
And I don’t see that happening. Problem is, with mobility computing – and infinitely more so with tablets than laptops – it’s difficult to have the approach you had with PCs where you go out and buy a motherboard, some RAM, a hard drive, a video card and the like. Things aren’t nearly so modular in the miniature world, and going in and upgrading the processor on your tablet would almost certainly kick off a compatibility nightmare. Android, notionally open-source, is already fragmented to the point where Amazon chose to fork an older version rather than keep pace with the current version, and many Android users never get the opportunity to upgrade (and many of those who do don’t bother), so the prospects for slapping something together from spare parts and getting CyanogenMod to run on it seems like a fool’s errand.
At this point, the biggest thing is to not pledge yourself too much to one service. If Apple went down tomorrow (or did something to run me off), I would be kind of stuck as far as video purchases and a non-trivial chunk of my iTunes content…but Twitter, Evernote, RSS, weather services, Instagram, Netflix, WordPress, Tumblr? Could all run on an Android device. Hell, most of them would probably work on Nexus or Kindle alike. But until then, there’s no reason to jump off the current ride.
(This is the sort of logical post occasionally required to stop the glee. The shoe glee has also been arrested for the time being, which is nice, because that was about to get expensive. You can spend hella money on hand-sewn American shoes with a Goodyear welt.)