Ambient Computing and the Final Days of Flagship Devices
For decades now, it’s been a habit to keep renewing our devices. Our phones, our laptops, our desktop computers have been begging for a one or two thousand dollar upgrade every few years — sometimes every year. Fortunately for all of us, those days are almost over as the age of ambient computing brings products and services to you regardless of what you use.
The Flagship Arms Race
Year after year, the old stuff just didn’t cut it anymore. We took more photos and apps got bigger so we needed more space. Apps started getting more and fancier features so the old hardware struggled to keep up. Games got more impressive and needed newer GPUs to be able to play. We needed bigger batteries to cope with increased screen time as well as all that new hardware.
So the time comes for that upgrade, but then all the options start looming large. Memory, CPUs, GPUs, storage, cameras, resolution. All those flagship devices look amazing but is everything going to transfer seamlessly? Would a cheaper version suffice? What if you go with a different manufacturer? Will you keep all your messages, photos, and emails? What about your game progress or system preferences?
And then the bigger questions. Are you even staying with the same operating system? You’ve been in one camp but now the other camp looks enticing. Won’t you lose everything in the switch? These problems are all too familiar because they happen on repeat.
Time for a Revolution
Fortunately, the time is coming when we no longer need to answer those questions as all of it is slowly becoming irrelevant. Tech has been moving to make this irrelevant for a while. No one truly cares about gigabytes of memory or teraflops of graphical power.
We all just want to be able to perform certain functions — work, play, and live — regardless of which devices are helping us.
We’re living in a time when you can stand in the middle of your home and call out what you need. Turn on the lights, play relaxing music, watch “The Umbrella Academy”, start the Roomba. It doesn’t matter if there’s an iPhone in your pocket or an Echo on the table because the result is the same, and if you have both, you might not even be aware which one did the work. Meanwhile, the developers of the apps, services, and games that fulfill those needs also just want us to buy and use them. They don’t want hardware barriers to exist either.
Take phones for example. On the mobile hardware front, device manufacturers like Xiaomi, Oppo and OnePlus started popping up in recent years, creating hardware similar to Apple and Samsung at half the price. This created new pricing competition, but it also revealed the basic uniformity of the tech itself, regardless of brand; and it illustrated that each device, regardless of cost, basically does the same things as the next comparable device, with only marginal and often superficial differences.
While device manufacturers continued their flagship turf wars, much bigger players were thinking about ways to remove the hardware barrier altogether and started developing massive cloud computing solutions instead. Microsoft has Azure, Amazon has AWS, Google has GCP and these are taking over the heavy lifting. If you want to collaborate on a document, chat with colleagues, learn a new skill or catch some quick entertainment, there’s very likely a web app powered by a massive cloud-service that lets you do just that.
The great thing is that this means your hardware can just handle the simple stuff — more often than not, just rendering a web page or streaming a video. All those gigahertz of power and gigabytes of memory and storage just sit idly by while you work online. If you switch to another machine, you can pick up right where you left off.
The basic principle is that we’re freed from any one device to be able to do what we want — to the extent that we’re only passively aware of how we’re doing something and only focused on what we’re doing. Personal assistants like Siri, Alexa, and the Google Assistant are the go-to examples of this because you can reach them in multiple ways, but this concept is also what’s powering a massive shift in products and services to be usable from anywhere — all moving to the cloud and supporting interfaces for tv, desktop, mobile, watches, voice and more.
There’s also a new tech buzzword for this device-agnostic ideal: ambient computing.
The Desktop Revolution
On the application front, this is something that Google, in particular, has understood and been pursuing for years — and they’re honestly way ahead of the curve. Players like Microsoft and Amazon are pitching in too, albeit often in a game of catch-up.
Where the norm was to install a whole suite of office applications, dealing with version and license headaches, Google answered that you can do it all online with Google Docs. While we were all accustomed to our email applications, clumsily trying to figure out POP and IMAP settings, Google suggested we just visit an essentially bottomless web inbox named Gmail. As gamers dropped $400 on a game console or $2000 on a gaming PC, Google offered to be able to play the biggest titles from your browser with Google Stadia. And for all of those things, you can do them just as well on a $200 device as on a $2000 device.
Google honestly doesn’t care about having a suite of office tools. They don’t care about delivering all your emails either. They certainly aren’t chomping at the bit to get into gaming. All they want is to get you on the internet. This is where they thrive. Google basically owns the web so that’s where they want you to live. They want to kill both the PC and the Mac, because all those old “desktop applications” do nothing for Google.
Those are their motivations though, but Google’s needs and ours are interestingly aligned. Being able to do anything from anywhere is exactly what we want. It’s why we carry smartphones everywhere, even feeling naked without them, and it’s why we have dumped PCs and iMacs en masse for laptops. This is further evidenced by the number of people that flocked to Gmail, how we all watch YouTube, how Microsoft scrambled to get Office 365 online to keep people from moving in droves to Google Docs, and why suddenly Microsoft and Nvidia announced the imminent launches of their own game-streaming services when Google launched Stadia.
The advent of game-streaming services, in particular, negates one of the last major reasons for big hardware purchases: gaming. If you can buy a demanding, new title like Borderlands 3 for $60 and start playing it anywhere in 5 seconds, then the prospect of forking over hundreds to thousands on hardware, while still spending the same $60 for the game becomes far less attractive. Add to that waiting an hour or more for it to download and install, incessant updates while still only being able to play it from one machine, and the old way of doing things starts looking downright archaic compared to the cloud-based click-and-play promise.
Going online means freedom for all of us. It’s a good thing. It means that your four-year-old Mac can still whip up spreadsheets just fine and your yellowed, aging work PC is perfectly capable of slaying demons in blistering detail in DOOM Eternal during your lunch break. As a matter of fact, some of the most popular desktop communication apps, like Slack and Discord, are already built completely using web technology, meaning you can use them just as well by visiting a website as you can by installing them. For stragglers like Adobe, time is running out. Either they get on board, or tomorrow they’ll go the way of the dinosaurs as web-minded newcomers blow past them.
The OS Revolution
While going online is great for us, it’s bad news for the companies that are used to doing things the old way. In particular, it’s yet to be seen what OS X and Windows look like in the age of ambient computing and the cloud. Google introduced ChromeOS just over ten years ago to show the world what was coming and, unsurprisingly, much of the world laughed. After all, it’s a comparatively simple, little OS that essentially functions as a browser. Even today it has less than 2% of the market, compared to OS X’s 18% and Windows’ 77%, and its growth is still a slow creep. Those numbers give the impression their vision isn’t panning out.
Fortunately for Google, all it really needs to do is wait for more and more applications to move to the web. In the meantime, for most of us, our Macs and PCs are largely just fancy ways to boot up a browser. Certainly, not everything is web-based yet, but just think of how much time you spend using your computer for the web. If you’re anything like me, your browser, with bunches of tabs, is never closed. And there’s a 68% chance the browser you’re using is Chrome, especially since it works across every operating system. This was a really smart move on Google’s part because the separation between ChromeOS and Chrome is extremely small. Essentially, if you’re using Chrome, you’re already using ChromeOS, regardless of which logo you see when you boot up your computer. Suddenly, those OS market share numbers don’t seem to make much sense anymore.
When the last of your desktop apps goes online, it starts becoming quite a bit less interesting to spend $2000 on a piece of hardware just to see an Apple or Windows logo while you wait to open Chrome. At that point, a light-weight $300 Chrome-focused machine with a longer battery life starts looking like a pretty realistic option. And that’s the point: these devices are all starting to do the same things and the reasons to pay a premium for one brand over another is rapidly melting away.
But, while the sands are shifting, Microsoft and Apple often seem to be looking the wrong way. They’re both so used to fighting to gain ground in the OS battle that they haven’t noticed that war has moved online.
For example, consider the Microsoft Store, which Microsoft consistently pushes heavily. It’s chock-full of games, generally poorly-rated apps for web-services like WhatsApp and Netflix and the odd productivity tool. The Mac App Store isn’t much better, again revolving around games, web-services, and a few more productivity and design tools. These stores are clear evidence that both platforms are desperately clinging to desktop apps because, without them, they basically have no reason to exist. Apple seems to recognize that there’s a problem but doesn’t understand where it’s coming from as it pushes mobile developers to port their iOS apps to OS X to keep its desktop OS relevant.
Worse still, Apple actively denies innovative cloud services like xCloud and Stadia from publishing to their app stores in an attempt to retain control over an ecosystem that is steadily growing past them. Since cloud services ideally run on anything, supporting them diminishes the value of owning a specific Microsoft or Apple machine, but in a catch 22, not supporting them diminishes the value of those machines even further. It’s a lose-lose scenario for them.
As a consequence, in the near future, we’re very likely to see major changes in both OS X and Windows that steadily bring the web to the forefront, simply because they have no choice. The stores will start to embrace web apps (something Microsoft already does with PWAs — but more on that later) and perhaps even service subscriptions, purely because they have to if they want to remain relevant and useful in the age of ambient computing. Microsoft already threw in the towel on browser technology, basing Edge on Chrome’s underlying technology, Chromium. Nevertheless, they understand that they need to figure out how to bring back the glory days of Internet Explorer dominance by integrating it more tightly with Microsoft accounts. That brings with it a level of portability and freedom that is almost mandatory at this point, but is hampered by the fact that it’s only portable to the next Microsoft machine — whereas Chrome, for example, lives everywhere. But as long as Microsoft and Apple insist on making their software exclusively available on their respective systems, in the long run, they’re still playing a losing game where the device-agnostic nature of ambient computing is becoming the norm and cloud-giants rule.
Some notes should certainly be taken from ChromeOS. If you’ve ever used a Chromebook, you’ll know that certain things feel right at home from the moment that you first log in with your Google account. This is because of the seamless integration with Chrome in general. The first thing that happens is that it instantly pulls in every extension and app that you already use with Chrome on any other system. You basically just opened up a machine that handed you the exact same customized Chrome browser that you use on Windows or OS X, your passwords and preferences came along, and you can even pull up the tabs from your other sessions. And this all happens within seconds of opening your first Chromebook. There was no setup or introduction or learning curve. It doesn’t try to differentiate itself or tell you how a computer should work. It just welcomes you back to the web and gets out of your way.
This is what an OS in the age of ambient computing should feel like. Instead of feeling like you’re missing “your” laptop, you should be able to feel at home on any machine. You can be completely device-agnostic. By design, OS X and Windows don’t do that — you have to effectively learn OS X and Windows — and they consequently have a lot of work to do to become cloud-friendly. Otherwise, that 2% ChromeOS market share is going to be a painful memory in a few years.
The Mobile Revolution
You might be thinking I’ve been conveniently skipping over one major area where everything is native: mobile. Barely any mobile apps have web-based interfaces — and with good reason. Until recently, lots of web technology was still a bit too heavy and smartphones weren’t quite fast enough to handle the load of rendering full-blown web apps for them to be super smooth experiences. It’s a truly valid problem and likely the biggest hold up to everything moving to the web. We needed a flagship phone race to help solve it.
Originally, there were many attempts to make web-based apps — perhaps most (in)famously by Facebook in 2012, which even resulted in Mark issuing an apology for not going native. His head was in the right place, thinking that being web-based meant more flexibility and avoiding building multiple native apps to do identical things. It was visionary and logical, but it was also naive. While it sounded promising to make an app once with well-established web tech and have it instantly work on every new mobile platform (which back then included Windows Phone, Blackberry and Bada/Tizen next to iOS and Android), there were too many browsers that didn’t agree on the basics and it just didn’t work well enough. As a result, app developers simply gave up and went back to making native apps which work smoothly. Users are much happier when things work smoothly.
But native apps were always a Band-Aid solution to web technology and mobile hardware being behind. That gap is closing and the reasons to keep using the native Band-Aid are evaporating. Google’s creation of and Microsoft’s push on the development of “Progressive Web Apps”, or PWAs, has created a new opportunity for developers to create extremely efficient, streamlined, mobile-friendly versions of apps that are entirely web-based and highly performant. And these don’t feel like websites at all. They support all kinds of native functionality like local installation, location detection, notifications, camera use, offline functionality, background synchronization, etc., blurring the lines between the possibilities on native versus web. On top of that, they work great on desktop browsers, meaning that we’ve quietly already achieved the holy grail of cross-platform development.
Additionally, all of the mobile app stores now welcome (or in Apple’s case, begrudgingly permit) PWAs, paving the way for users to install and use apps without even noticing that they’ve become a part of the web movement. Microsoft has pushed this even further by developing tools to make PWAs easy for developers to distribute to both the Microsoft Store and Apple App Store, clearly showing that they recognize the advantages that PWAs bring for the future. Microsoft has reportedly even been scraping the web, hunting for PWAs in the wild and adding them to their store automatically.
All of this means that those qualms about the web being too heavy for phones have been largely mitigated by being tackled from two fronts. Phone hardware has long passed the milestones necessary for smooth mobile web experiences, while mobile browsers and web technology have been vastly optimized for them. This means that phones can become much simpler devices, basically being nothing more than a beautiful screen with ample battery power and a bunch of sensors. They don’t need to push for the next blisteringly fast chips. They just need a great connection — which is where 5G helps ramp up the possibilities — since their primary purpose is becoming to serve up cloud services.
The Cloud Revolution
Chances are, you’ve already (perhaps unwittingly) been a big part of this revolution. You started to store your photos in the cloud, so you haven’t been hunting for terabyte external drives anymore. You want a phone with a bigger screen and a longer battery life but aren’t sure how many gigahertz the CPU is or how much memory it has. You probably flip-flop a bit on whether Android or iOS should be your next phone and whether OS X or Windows is best for you, because none of them feel quite right. The cost of switching walled gardens pains you. If you pay for something on one platform you don’t want to pay for it again on another.
That’s because, instinctively, you already know where we’re headed. We already have one foot firmly planted in the cloud — pulling what we want from it when we need it, regardless of what brand is emblazoned into the back of the device in front of you. Static content, like TV shows, movies, and newspapers were the first and easiest to move there, but now you can even play high-end games on any device. It won’t be long before the hold-outs like Photoshop get powerful cloud-based solutions. Just picture your giant Adobe Premiere video project rendering in the cloud, notifying you wherever you are when it’s complete, instead of chugging along and putting the expensive machine that’s firmly planted in your office out of commission for hours.
Once that happens and the last of your apps goes to the cloud, you’ll finally be completely free from the shackles of walled gardens and flagship hardware, and you’ll be able to fully embrace the freedom of ambient computing.
As a futurist and a nerd, I view this as a beautiful thing that I truly believe will benefit everyone. We’re in the middle of it, and we’re witnessing the slow-motion fall of old tech giants, the rise of new ones, and the shifting sands for entire industries. I, for one, can’t wait for my favorite services to be everywhere and anywhere I need or want them. Just imagine a world where a driverless car takes you to your next hotel room, where the lights change to your usual evening setting as you hear your schedule for tomorrow, and you blurt out “continue watching Mindhunter” without logging in to anything. That world is around the corner — and that, to me, is truly exciting. The phone in your pocket, the laptop in your bag, and the watch on your wrist are only minor pieces of that evolution. There will be no gated access to that future — as when any device can bring you the same great experiences, flagship devices will just be technological marvels for blogs to muse over.
