I’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about device modalities when it comes to personal computer use— a fancy way of saying: I’ve spent far too much time thinking about what to take on day trips, to meetings, or even to the office.

Compare 2012 to 2007 for a moment to see why: in 2007, I had one 15 inch Macbook Pro that weigh as much as a small boat anchor and cost $3,500. In 2012 I can use the same amount of dollars to buy an iPhone, an iPad mini, and iPad Retina, a Kindle and two Macbook Airs. What is more, my content creation and consumption across media, social networks, work and side projects is split across all of these devices in ways that guarantees no matter what I’ve left at home, I am going to miss something.

I know, I know— a high class problem to have. Or is it? Most people already own smartphones. And for a while now, laptops have been issued as the choice “bicycles for the mind” of information workers. Combine these two devices with a media-based subsidy model for some sort of a content consumption tablet and you’ve got the average Joe carrying (or thinking about) carrying 3 devices— again certainly for less money than they spent on their purple Sony VAIO a decade ago.

The big platform guys would do well to think about this software above the level of a single device view of the world and design use cases around it. Sure Dropbox and Evernote enable some of this but in what feels like tweener solutions; for instance, the iOS/Android Dropbox apps are nothing more than document viewers on devices which by design don’t come with filesystems. Similarly, I used to be a fan of AirDisplay which allowed my iPad to become my laptop’s external display or Type2Phone which allows your laptop keyboard to become an external Bluetooth keyboard to your smartphone but both of these are truly just parlor tricks.

And so I’m left with an iMessage experience which is still very broken across devices (the phone can bridge to texts when required but no other devices can?) or worse still, apps that carry the same name (iPhoto) but possess radically different sets of functionality. And this is all while “on the same platform!”

Navigating this world of software above the level of a single device won’t be easy but it will be increasingly a differentiator for the big companies and it’s a good place to put some cycles towards as we think of designing for abundance of devices we’re currently lucky enough to have.

Everyone loves the Nexus 7. It's the "right size." It's "like butter." Even the Apple loyalists are questioning whether the broken nose syndrome that can come from precariously balancing a 10 inch 1.5 lb tablet on your chest late at night is worth it in the face of this little waif.

For me though, there is no clearer sign that the Nexus 7 (like the much crappier Kindle Fire before it) belongs to a new class of device: the disposable vending machine for digital content. Worth it from a software perspective only if you are ok consuming content from the hard wired app stores that each of the platform players provide. They give up the gross margin on the hardware and you give up: usability, control, and general purpose-ness for the sake of consuming content like you never have before.

Sure you can install Android Market (er, Google Play) apps. And sure you can even replace the launcher— if you are interested in getting back into the brain damage of the typical Android spring board experience. But this is not the experience of the mainstream user paying $200-250 for what seems like a "deal." And the deal? Paying for the placement of a vending machine right in your lap— one that sells you cokes while you can read up on your tweet stream.

As far as I am concerned, the main thing the Nexus 7 proves is that the e-reader form factor can be extended for checking email, playing games, and the occasional web surfing experience. But this is much more of a wake up call for Amazon (who hopes to own the category of e-readers++) than Apple who might be just fine waiting to launch a 7 inch tablet until price pressure forces them to.

I like my Nexus 7 (unlike my Kindle Fire). But primarily as an e-reader. As a vending machine, I prefer the kind where I stick quarters in...

The iPad 3 adheres to the old saw in technology that there is magic in version 3. While it is true that this is in part due to how wonderfully rich the app ecosystem has become, from a pure hardware perspective, the combination of a 264 dpi display and a lightning fast cellular network is about as magical as the many reviews have claimed.

At HP, the ink and paper crowd was always obsessed with what was known as the "300 dpi barrier," the thought being that until affordable displays got there, there would still be plenty of room for consumers printing the stuff that wasn't going to get stuck to the refrigerator. From my perspective, the pre retina iPad had already eliminated that for most of the universe of printable disposable content, but this new display has killed one of the last bastions of the printed page: the mixed content (text & graphs), multi-column, full page (usually) PDF document. Just this weekend I was reading a Comscore report with a number of tables & graphs and for the first time ever, I didn't feel the need to print any part of it out. Incidentally, this was the market for the Kindle DX but unfortunately that device was never general purpose enough to merit its price tag.

And on the network side, it is hard to explain the improvement until you experience it. Or rather, it is easy to conceptually understand the impact of more bandwidth, and slightly less easy but still possible to grok lower latency. But LTE feels ever better than the sum of those two factors. Quite simply it just feels more immediate. Struck by what the cause might be for this, I spent a little time poking around the Qualcomm site and came across this paper (consumed on the retina display of course) that argued that startup time from a "cold modem" (one which starts from an idle state) is quite a bit faster on an LTE connection than on a HSPDA (3G) one (about 3X), driven largely by improvements in signaling. And while it is true that most tablets live and die on wifi (92% of data traffic according to Comscore is coming from Wifi connections as opposed to 25-50% for smartphones), I think the speed of this modem may be about to begin to change that particular "leave at home" use pattern.

In fact, for the first time since the launch of the original iPad, I am now convinced that we've got a fundamentally different platform for which a new class of productivity applications ought to emerge. Something like the new iPhoto but on steroids since it should go way beyond leveraging the direct manipulation interface to using both the resolution of the display and the network in new and unexpected ways. It's too early to tell but my money is on new types of collaborative applications that leverage the high pixel density to navigate large datasets and the realtime nature of persistent and lightning-fast connectivity to put the collaboration in environments where users have been forced on "batch" mode for compute resources. Architects, field folks, and even presenters at conferences are a few of the examples I can think of for starters.

Finally, it bears mentioning that the iPad3 will likely not remain the only entrant (nor even necessarily the dominant entrant) in the market now that it has defined the spec that everyone else needs to hit now that it has, at least in my mind, validated the category as more than a portable television crossed with a poor man's laptop.

I am sold. Down with laptops and up with the strokable slates!

Try as I might to find objective data in their financials to show the slowing of the platform, I found it difficult to observe any cracks in the iOS money-making machine. Apple is continuing to spend fewer dollars as a percentage of revenue on both marketing and engineering (the easy way to tell at a macro level that an at-scale tech franchise is sucking wind), and their integrated approach continues to win the hearts and minds of the US consumer thus keeping legions of developers working first on iOS and later on Android.

Still, it cannot be a healthy thing that the bulk of the economics are going to Apple, and not just two-thirds of the profits in the handset market but most of the ecosystem rents in the app ecosystem, music business, smartphone carrier business and whatever other industry segments they chose to enter. The fact that this may in several cases be a direct wealth transfer from X industry to gross margin dollars on iOS devices that have the same components as their Android cousins (and are in some cases made on the same lines) does not make it less healthy.

This simply cannot last. And this mind-blowing chart from Asymco tells the story of why:

(Go and read the post— and then come back to get a fantastic historical context to the waves of the personal computing industry)

It is astounding to see how quickly the smartphone has dominated all other individual computing platforms. While there are obvious reasons (truly portable computers that are always with you, ubiquitous access to the Internet, carrier subsidies), the key point is that on top of being far bigger, far faster, the forces at play in mobile (economic, technical and social) make it the single most dynamic multi-billion dollar industry in the world. Yesterday's king is today's pauper with just the smallest series of missteps.

Since those steps can't be observed from macro metrics, I thought it might be interesting to paint a picture of why the incremental developer on the platform might be losing steam with the promise of becoming an "AppStore Rock Star." After all, if Microsoft has taught the world anything over the last decade, it is that losing the hearts and minds of developers can seriously arrest the momentum of any platform, network effects be damned. While there are plenty of iOS developer surveys out there, they are hard to parse for perceived changes of momentum (though not for sampling bias in most cases) so instead, I'll focus on three reasons why we might be on the cusp of a change in the tide here:

First, while there are more iOS developers building better looking apps and standing a better chance of making money from the AppStore than other smartphone marketplaces, the reality is that app prices continue to plummet making it increasingly hard for the small team/solo cottage industry that gave us some of the AppStore's early hits to continue making a living (to say nothing of the increasing complaints I hear from developers about the opaqueness of the approval/update process). Put another way, there is now much more money going through the AppStore than is being generated because of the AppStore.

Here is a crude example in just one of many of the "through" verticals: last year Apple paid roughly $2.5-3 billion to all AppStore developers worldwide. At the same time if we take a 1% estimate of e-commerce sales that went through apps in the AppStore (haircutting the mobile 10% of ~$680 worldwide 2011 e-commerce sales by 20% for iOS and a further 50% for non mobile web) is still around $7B which at 30% gross margins is right around current developer revenue. And this is just one of the many verticals that monetizes well through the AppStore whereas the $2.5B includes games (a huge part of revenues) and in-app payments for content. Not only are the economics of app purchase not compelling (and heading in the wrong direction), but the broader platform point is that none of this money exists because of something unique to the iOS ecosystem. It could just as easily move to Android despite the latter's lower "because of" current monetization ability through the sheer power of market share.

While Apple has done a brilliant job of defending its own ecosystem through the half million bits of effort (apps) from independent developers, it has not, unlike the Microsoft of the 1990s, managed to create a thriving ISV community dependent on iOS for revenue in the way that Windows developers made their livelihood— and in some cases very large companies— on the back of Win32. Where is the Lotus of the AppStore? Thus far, Rovio (Angry Birds) comes the closest, and even they have quickly diversified to a plethora of platforms despite being in the lucrative gaming app vertical.

Second, while there is no question in my mind that the iOS toolchain is far superior to the kludge that is Android's (which is now also encumbered by increasing fragmentation (both vendor and version wise) and Uncle Oracle's ownership of the underlying language), fancy development environments and better UI toolkits don't keep developers around for the long term (see again: 1990s Win32 development), but platform ubiquity does— especially in a making money "through" era where virality is your new marketing, and more than 1/2 the market is only accessible on either Android or the mobile web. Think of viral loops and how quickly they can die when 50% of the invites fail to land on an iOS device.

Finally, there is the straight jacket that is the controlled experience of iOS, most commonly felt today in the way Apple implemented background processing on its platform. The arguments for this poor man's multi-tasking have been battery and CPU constraints but as both have improved (with the iPhone 4 and 4S) they appear less relevant. In the meanwhile interesting apps need better control over what can happen in the background (think of what comes after the "check in" for location-based social networks or almost all communications apps now being funneled through the unintuitive Notification Center). The iOS devices are now at the point where they are quite powerful computers— and the most relevant computers in people's lives— so continuing to maintain a small sandbox for third parties to exploit the possibilities will only increasingly make alternative platforms attractive. Put in a much geekier way: the smartphone is today's tricorder and in order for developers to make it that, the first place they need more control is in what happens in the background. Android gets you that today and Apple would be wise to follow.

One final point related to why developer momentum may lag in the coming years: in 2007 when Steve Jobs launched the original iPhone, he claimed that it was "five years ahead of the rest of the market," which, as it turns out, seems to have been remarkably accurate. The market has now caught up though, and outside of incremental upgrades (higher density display, faster multicore processors, etc.), Apple has given us only two "next generation" pieces of functionality: iCloud which, while promising, is far from ready for prime time; and Siri, a fundamentally transformative interface step forward— something which Apple itself is quite good at— but works far too poorly to become mainstream today. In both cases, a robust API for third parties could enable the hundreds of thousands of independent developers who got the iPhone where it is today to help iOS continue to cement its leadership position. It would be messy, and there would be ugly moments, and it would quite likely be an un-Apple move to make. Without it though, the platform may have nowhere to go but down from here.

[Ed note: before people start pointing out how much money Apple is making and how successful it is— I agree. I am looking for signs that this may end here and to that end, this is a speculative piece]