[NatCh]

Originally Posted by radleyp

NatCh, your memory does not, I am afraid, serve you correctly.

Heh, it wouldn't be the first time!

Originally Posted by radleyp

Jobs said that nobody was reading BOOKS anymore and so a book-reading device was by extension not in his plans.

We're talking about this thread, yes? If so, the quote I was thinking of was this one from the first post:

"It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore... The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."

He may have meant books, but in that comment, at least, he didn't actually say books.

EDIT: Following the quote back to the full source, he did reference books:

“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.”

However, I think most folks were reacting to the partial quote that appeared here. /EDIT

Originally Posted by radleyp

What Doctorow is saying, however, has been said on this site many times and in different threads, and that's why I don't understand this reaction. As for putting many functions on such a device, that can work, it seems to me, only when we have expanding screens because a phone is a pocket device that must be able to be held in one hand.

You're quite right, the discussion of the relative merits of dedicated versus multipurpose devices has been a frequent one around here, and it's always an interesting one because there are really good points on both sides of it. Like anyone else, I find some of those compelling, and others not so much so, but I also realize that most of those points are going to have different levels of importance to different people.

Personally, I don't think that either the "all convergence" nor the "all dedicated" views are correct. Some things make sense to combine and others just don't, and what those things are varies from person to person.

Until we get to some new level of understanding in some areas of material science and physics, so that we get more control over the stuff we make things out of, we're probably not going to see anything that's truly all-in-one.


Another possible reason that Jobs' comments might have gotten such strong reactions, is that the man just seems to incite strong reactions in folks no matter what he does.