Amazon’s Vision of Computing’s Future: An Information Appliance - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/28/technology/amazons-vision-of-computings-future-an-information-appliance.html
I suspect you’re scoffing. The primary knock on Mr. Raskin’s information appliance was that it didn’t do a whole lot. This is also the main criticism of the Echo and, now, the Echo Show. These devices can’t do anything you can’t do on your phone, PC or tablet.
That’s true, but it also kind of misses the point. You can make toast in the oven, but you have a toaster because it’s designed to perform a specific task reliably and without any fuss.
That’s the point of the information appliance, too. There’s a whole lot the Echo Show won’t do. It won’t do email. It won’t do the web. It won’t play first-person shooters. It is emphatically, purposely not a general-purpose computer. But what it does do — play music and videos, make video calls, tell you the news, tell you the time and weather, and shop at Amazon — it does with such surpassing ease that it feels like a magic trick.
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