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.

Anil Dash has a terrific post on the web we let go when we went easy on the attributes that brought us all here in favor of the convenient and easy. The thing that got me about the piece was the thread it pulled from a half decade ago around RSS and podcasts and more generally the world of great possibilities around people publishing to a world of humans and machines who listened. That is clearly gone now when it comes to the open web, replaced by a sort of sharecropping of eyeballs and identity in the face of the inexorable march of the business model. If indeed the purest expression of intent is the Google Search then that is the world we are all left dealing with: looking for the digital crumbs that might be worth pennies on the dollar of search harvesting intent be they social or mobile pennies— neither of which will ever be as good as what the Great Google once brought us.

But what Anil's piece hints at is a world where we might have ended up with a set of richer social experiments where syndication and personal publishing might have led to a more interesting set of equilibria where new business models might have emerged that were not centered on harvesting first order intent or even just eyeballs to be “looked alike” or “retargeted” for the sake of the ever ephemeral CPM. He does not lay out what that world might look like because he just doesn’t know— and neither do we, at least not until some brave entrepreneur dares to dream big outside of the current context and show us where we might be going from here.

And until then, we’ll just have to rely on William Gibson and his view that thought the future might already be here, it simply is just not widely distributed.

Merry Christmas 2012 everybody!

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 Economist has a great survey this week on the future of manufacturing with some really interesting articles on short-run digital manufacturing, labor arbitrage opportunities (potentially moving manufacturing back from China), and collaborative manufacturing in the age of collaborative consumption.

Overall as with their recent interest 3D printing, these guys seem very bullish on the future of additive manufacturing technologies such as FDM and SLA. One interesting fact mentioned a few times is that the percentage of finished parts coming out of additive machines (where you deposit or solidify a powder/polymer/etc in a sort of 3D inkjet process) is up to 20-28% for final use parts as opposed to prototype use case which have been the main purview of these manufacturing techniques for a couple of decades now. From prosthetic limbs to airplane parts it turns out that increasingly the benefits of the accuracy of a computer model when combined with the precision of a finely controlled 3D printer is finding its way into mainstream products.

Despite the success of the fantastic entrepreneurs at companies like Makerbot, the mainstream use case is still elusive. At HP we used to wonder whether 3D fabrication through additive techniques would follow the inkjet distribution model (one in every home) or the service provider one (which remains one of the few growth areas in conventional ink on paper printing). The arguments for the latter are clear: more expensive machinery amortized over greater demand that can be kept in better shape by trained operators. But then again such was the argument for mainframes and minicomputers before the advent of the PC.

One thing I do wish they'd covered in the survey was the advances in subtractive manufacturing technologies because of digital design and the dropping costs of computation in general. Though modern forms of milling may be less sexy than the Star Trek replicator fantasies induced by the promise of 3D printing, the fine folks at MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms have all but convinced me of the relevance of subtractive techniques especially when it comes to near term hobbyist applications. I'll have more to say about those (and specifically about custom electronics) in posts to come.

The final point I'll mention from the survey is how generally optimistic and "lean forward" the promise of bringing the advantages of computing into the physical world through these new (or recently re-factored) manufacturing techniques is. Compared to the recent "SoLoMo" malaise (brilliantly covered by Alexis Madrigal in the Atlantic this week), it is a breath of fresh air.