| Thursday, March 3, 2011 |
05:56 - Computers and magnets, together at last
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I think what I find most interesting about the iPad 2 announcement has to do with the Smart Covers.
It's a damn good idea, and terribly well executed, but what I love most is how it's held on with magnets.
Remember how we were all taught that magnets are the great enemy of computers? In computer lab class in 4th grade, we'd all be admonished sternly by our teachers that if we had any magnets in our pockets, they'd erase our floppy disks and ruin the CRT monitors?
Well, monitors are now all LCDs. And magnetic hard drives are in the process of giving way to solid-state drives—and in the case of the iPad and similar products, have already been replaced with Flash memory.
Is there anything left in these computing devices that is susceptible to magnets?
That's what I think is so fun about watching Apple: lots of companies can be clever about cramming features into a box. But it seems only Apple is so adept at making these diagonal leaps of insight that lead them do do unexpected, ludicrous, obvious-in-retrospect things like removing the floppy drive from their all-in-one computer, or building a sweet-ass MP3 player to legitimize an industry overrun with piracy, or making a smartphone OS that's smoother and more fun to use than a desktop OS, or making a tablet PC that people scramble over each other to buy... or realizing that magnets are no longer a no-no around computers.
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Brian Tiemann
