Form and Function

As a person who entertained the possibility of flat-panel devices of various sizes in 2004, it's necessary to explain the form and function of such devices for historical account, especially when the anticipated devices resemble modern smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches.

Talking about form and function sounds like a designer's perspective, but the issue is actually pervasive in engineering. Consider a universal Turing machine with a infinite tape. If modern computers faithfully preserved the form of such Turing machines, they would never become useful for a great deal of applications, but remain a academic interest. Transistors, integrated circuits, multi-touch sensors, and GUI, etc. all matter to make modern gadgets so powerful and easy to use. It's about form and function.

The starting point is modern surveillance gadgets that take advantage of on-device or cloud AI to perform intelligent tasks for the user, like keyboard autocorrection, handwriting recognition, maps, not to mention searching. Cut off AI and modern gadgets suffer significant deficiency. Google search helps Apple as much as Google itself.

With multi-touch flat-panels, it's easy to simulate panels that render fixed hardware keyboard obsolete. Built upon AI, modern gadgets soon proved superior to feature phones.

Microsoft had dubious views about the form of mobile computing. They believe that tablet PC with clunky hardware keyboard and stylus-first GUI will conquer the world while multi-touch iPhone will struggle. It's obvious that Microsoft would fail if such views are deep-rooted. Let alone personal computing.

It's lucky that iPod and iTunes laid the foundation for Apple to introduce the iPhone as a reasonably useful device. Then App Store came and the uses for iPhone exploded. With the introduction of the iPad and Apple Watch, all synced together with the iPhone via iCloud, the scheme of flat-panel multi-touch devices is firmly established and works well with the Mac.

Niche products like Palm and Cintiq fade because general purpose computers are powerful enough to replace special purpose computers. It's Turing-completeness.

The rest is well-known history.