From TUAW, a story about a 99 year old women who buys her first computer, iPad, and is able to read and write again. She suffers from glaucoma which makes reading difficult.

The future of computing is changing.

With my recent purchase of iPad and Apple’s wireless Bluetooth keyboard, my daughter has been practicing her typing on the iPad using Pages. She asked, “will it save my typing?”

“Yes, it’ll save it. You don’t have to do anything,” I said.

Think about that. Here’s a list of things that she and I didn’t have to do:

• I didn’t have to show her how to save a document.
• She didn’t have to worry about losing work.
• She didn’t think of a name for her document (Pages automatically assigned one)
• She didn’t have to understand file/folder structure and decide where to save the document.

All she has to do is to exit out of the Pages app when she is done. Pages is definitely kid-friendly. As adults we don’t have to worry about this because we never lose work because we forget to save and we never forget where we save a file.

Apple now owns and controls their own mobile CPUs. There aren’t many companies in the world that can say that. And from what I saw today, Apple doesn’t just own and control a mobile CPU, they own and control the hands-down best mobile CPU in the world. Software aside (which is a huge thing to put aside), it may well be that no other company could make a device today matching the price, size, and performance of the iPad. They’re not getting into the CPU business for kicks, they’re getting into it to kick ass.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Its a device that will live somewhere between an iPhone and a notebook. Currently the iPhone packs just enough computing power to to get you through your day (or at lease it gets Steve Rubel through his day), but the computing power is not enough to do some serious work. The notebook on the other hand can handle every computing need you have but its still too clunky (think notebook bag, power cords, mouse, etc).

So, I think the tablet will be somewhere in between as far as computing power is concerned and ultra-portable but not pocket size. My prediction:

1. The form factor will be much like the iPhone. Glass top and almost button-less.
2. It’ll have wireless connectivity (cellular and Wi-Fi)
3. No stylus, of course. Mutlitouch only.
4. Storage capacity will be limited because there’s no hard drive. Only solid state memory.
5. They will tie in cloud computing somehow. iWork.com will play a role.

Whatever it is, be prepared to drool.

via flickr.com

In 2001, my wife and I were in the process of buying the house we currently live in now and we had a house inspector inspecting the house in order to complete the purchase. There’s not much that I remember from our house buying experience, but the thing I do remember is this: the house inspector was using an Apple Newton.

I tried to glance over his shoulder to see what he was marking down with his stylus. I never got a good look, but I remember thinking, “how cool”. The Newton is still beautiful to me and I’ve wanted to buy one from eBay for a long time now. One of these days…