Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Apple may need an iPhone 6 sooner than later


Apple may need an iPhone 6 sooner than later

Apple has limited itself to one screen size for the iPhone 5, but as the expected iPad mini indicates, Apple plans to expand its screen-size options to stay competitive.
Will iPhones and iPad be available in more shapes and sizes?
(Credit: Apple/CNET )
For Apple, the hits keep coming. The company launches a new iPhone and 5 million people snag one over the weekend. An iPad mini, expected to debut later this month, could get into the hands of 10 million users before the end of the year. And this is despite the fact that competitors offer a far broader array of smartphones and tablets, with a price, size and feature set to match the needs of almost any discerning customer.
The extraordinary popularity, and profitability, of Apple's products is in part based on the quality, consistency and simplicity of the offering. Apple avoids the pitfalls of the paradox of choice, a theory by psychologist Barry Schwartz that suggests too much choice makes it difficult to choose at all. No need to choose between Apple model 7844PQC, 6533PHX or the 5055PDQ or decide what operating system you should buy.
You want an iPhone 5? It comes in one size and two colors, with a few options for storage and networking. If you already know how to use an iPhone, this new version won't challenge your skills. How about a tablet? Apple has a model with a 9.7-inch screen and your choice of connectivity options.
Apple doesn't try to offer the most feature-rich or advanced mobile devices available. The way Apple chief designer Sir Jony Ive tells it, "Our goals are very simple -- to design and make better products. If we can't make something that is better, we won't do it."
Bigger than a 4-inch screen is not better for a smartphone. Apple has decided you should be able to operate your phone with one hand, and will only offer you a 4 inch iPhone 5 screen, or its 3.5 inch antecedents, the iPhone 4S and 4. Better is an iPhone 5 that is 18 percent thinner, 20 percent lighter, up to twice as fast and slightly longer than its predecessor, a flawed Map app notwithstanding.
"Most of our competitors are interested in doing something different, or want to appear new -- I think those are completely the wrong goals. A product has to be genuinely better. This requires real discipline, and that's what drives us -- a sincere, genuine appetite to do something that is better," Ive said in an interview with the London Evening Standard.

Whereas Apple offers limited choice, competitors are in the multiple choice business. They offer many more price points and feature options, including a variety of screen sizes, operating systems, cameras, networks and chips. And, they are doing more than just something different or new.
Motorola, for example, recently introduced three new Android phones, including a $99 unit with a 4.3-inch edge-to-edge display, a model with a 4.7-inch HD screen size and one with up to 32 hours of battery life. Samsung says it has sold 20 million of its Android-based Galaxy S3, with a 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED display at 1,280x720-pixel resolution, in its first 100 days on the market. 





There is a payoff in offering a broader selection of mobile devices for Apple's competitors. Google's Android platform dominates the market, with more than 60 percent share, compared to less than 20 for Apple. As RIM's Blackberry and Nokia's Symbian platforms decline, Microsoft is putting its prodigious marketing muscle behind its Windows 8 platform as an alternative to Apple's iOS and Android. Nokia, Samsung, HTC, Huawei and other will deliver Windows 8 smartphones and tablets following the Oct. 26 launch.
Microsoft's upcoming Surface tablet
Microsoft's upcoming Surface tablet
(Credit: Microsoft )
While the purveyors of choice are largely competing against each other, Apple has been extracting the majority of the profit for mobile devices and apps, making it the most financially valuable company in the world.
Apple prides itself on inventing the future, as it did when it introduced the iPhone and iPad, and famously shuns focus groups in designing its products. "It's unfair to ask people who don't have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design," Ive stated.
As the market for mobile devices matures, however, Apple's devotion to its "less is more" and "we know better" product strategy can be counterproductive.
Apple's current smartphone revolves around one-handed usage, and the company will milk the iPhone 5 for profit and market share and hope for a perfectly timed replacement that repeats that formula within a year. But the popularity of larger screens has to be a factor that impacts how long Apple can ride the iPhone 5. If the majority of smartphones sold in 2013 have larger than 4-inch screens, Apple isn't going to miss the market opportunity by sticking too long with its one-handed phone design. 
An iPhone 6 can be "genuinely better," as Ive demands, and available in more than one screen size without making customer choice a maze of options or its supply chain and financial engine less efficient.
Apple's competition is catching up (Credit: Pew Research Center)
It's likely that the Microsoft Surface and the parade of "convertible" or hybrid tablets coming out for Windows 8 is being closely watched by Apple, despite Tim Cook's statement, "You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but those things are probably not going be pleasing to the user."
If those hybrids start to gain momentum, Cook may reconsider the idea of perfecting an "iPadbook" that combines the best of the Macbook Air and iPad.
There are signs that Apple is more than ready to adapt and follow the pack with the rumored introduction of an 7.85 inch iPad mini later this month. Apple's has good reason to deliver a holiday iPad mini, given that its hold on the tablet market has slipped from a market share of over 80 percent to a still impressive 52 percent in the last year, according a Pew Research Center survey.  An iPad mini would allow the company to soak up some of the demand created by Google, Amazon and Barnes & Noble for smaller, cheaper tablets.
The majority of the two billion people online are not members of the smartphone or tablet tribe. Apple and its competitors have a massive opportunity ahead to develop products for an increasingly mobile and digital population. Apple isn't assuming that its brand, design sensibilities and nearly 400 stores are sufficient to insulate it from dynamic market changes. The expected iPad mini is a sign that Apple is beginning to think different, and an iPhone 6 cannot be too far behind. 

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Skilled Work, Without the Worker

Skilled Work, Without the Worker
Paul Sakuma/Associated Press
While the many robots in auto factories typically perform only one function, in the new Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif., a robot might do up to four: welding, riveting, bonding and installing a component.
DRACHTEN, the Netherlands — At the Philips Electronics factory on the coast of China, hundreds of workers use their hands and specialized tools to assemble electric shavers. That is the old way.

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Lianne Milton for The New York Times
A robot stacking solar panels at a factory in Milpitas, Calif.
At a sister factory here in the Dutch countryside, 128 robot arms do the same work with yoga-like flexibility. Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the capability of the most dexterous human.
One robot arm endlessly forms three perfect bends in two connector wires and slips them into holes almost too small for the eye to see. The arms work so fast that they must be enclosed in glass cages to prevent the people supervising them from being injured. And they do it all without a coffee break — three shifts a day, 365 days a year.
All told, the factory here has several dozen workers per shift, about a tenth as many as the plant in the Chinese city of Zhuhai.
This is the future. A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution. Factories like the one here in the Netherlands are a striking counterpoint to those used by Apple and other consumer electronics giants, which employ hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers.
“With these machines, we can make any consumer device in the world,” said Binne Visser, an electrical engineer who manages the Philips assembly line in Drachten.
Many industry executives and technology experts say Philips’s approach is gaining ground on Apple’s. Even as Foxconn, Apple’s iPhone manufacturer, continues to build new plants and hire thousands of additional workers to make smartphones, it plans to install more than a million robots within a few years to supplement its work force in China.
Foxconn has not disclosed how many workers will be displaced or when. But its chairman, Terry Gou, has publicly endorsed a growing use of robots. Speaking of his more than one million employees worldwide, he said in January, according to the official Xinhua news agency: “As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”
The falling costs and growing sophistication of robots have touched off a renewed debate among economists and technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost. This year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made the case for a rapid transformation. “The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications,” they wrote in their book, “Race Against the Machine.”
In their minds, the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today. The analogy is not only to the industrialization of agriculture but also to the electrification of manufacturing in the past century, Mr. McAfee argues.
“At what point does the chain saw replace Paul Bunyan?” asked Mike Dennison, an executive at Flextronics, a manufacturer of consumer electronics products that is based in Silicon Valley and is increasingly automating assembly work. “There’s always a price point, and we’re very close to that point.”
But Bran Ferren, a veteran roboticist and industrial product designer at Applied Minds in Glendale, Calif., argues that there are still steep obstacles that have made the dream of the universal assembly robot elusive. “I had an early naïveté about universal robots that could just do anything,” he said. “You have to have people around anyway. And people are pretty good at figuring out, how do I wiggle the radiator in or slip the hose on? And these things are still hard for robots to do.”
Beyond the technical challenges lies resistance from unionized workers and communities worried about jobs. The ascension of robots may mean fewer jobs are created in this country, even though rising labor and transportation costs in Asia and fears of intellectual property theft are now bringing some work back to the West.
Take the cavernous solar-panel factory run by Flextronics in Milpitas, south of San Francisco. A large banner proudly proclaims “Bringing Jobs & Manufacturing Back to California!” (Right now China makes a large share of the solar panels used in this country and is automating its own industry.)
Yet in the state-of-the-art plant, where the assembly line runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there are robots everywhere and few human workers. All of the heavy lifting and almost all of the precise work is done by robots that string together solar cells and seal them under glass. The human workers do things like trimming excess material, threading wires and screwing a handful of fasteners into a simple frame for each panel.

The iPhone 5 Scores Well, With a Quibble

The iPhone 5 Scores Well, With a Quibble
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Apple announced the iPhone 5, the latest version of its smartphone, at an event in San Francisco last week.
If you were taking a college course called iPhone 101, your professor might identify three factors that have made Apple’s smartphone a mega-success.
Peter DaSilva for The New York Times
The iPhone 5, top, and iPhone 4S. The iPhone 5’s smaller connector does not fit existing accessories, docks or chargers.
First, design. A single company, known for its obsession over details, produces both the hardware and the software. The result is a single, coherently designed whole.
Second, superior components. As the world’s largest tech company, Apple can call the shots with its part suppliers. It can often incorporate new technologies — scratch-resistant Gorilla glass, say, or the supersharp Retina screen — before its rivals can.
Third, compatibility. The iPhone’s ubiquity has led to a universe of accessories that fit it. Walk into a hotel room, and there’s probably an iPhone connector built into the alarm clock.
If you had to write a term paper for this course, you might open with this argument: that in creating the new iPhone 5 ($200 with contract), Apple strengthened its first two advantages — but handed its rivals the third one on a silver platter.
Let’s start with design. The new phone, in all black or white, is beautiful. Especially the black one, whose gleaming, black-on-black, glass-and-aluminum body carries the design cues of a Stealth bomber. The rumors ran rampant that the iPhone 5 would have a larger screen. Would it be huge, like many Android phones? Those giant screens are thudding slabs in your pocket, but they’re fantastic for maps, books, Web sites, photos and movies.
As it turns out, the new iPhone’s updated footprint (handprint?) is nothing like the Imax size of its rivals. It’s the same 2.3 inches wide, but its screen has grown taller by half an inch — 176 very tiny pixels.
It’s a nice but not life-changing change. You gain an extra row of icons on the Home screen, more messages in e-mail lists, wider keyboard keys in landscape mode and a more expansive view of all the other built-in apps. (Non-Apple apps can be written to exploit the bigger screen. Until then, they sit in the center of the larger screen, flanked by unnoticeable slim black bars.)
At 0.3 inch, the phone is thinner than before, startlingly so — the thinnest in the world, Apple says. It’s also lighter, just under four ounces; it disappears completely in your pocket. This iPhone is so light, tall and flat, it’s well on its way to becoming a bookmark.
Second advantage: components. There’s no breakthrough feature this time, no Retina screen or Siri. (Thought recognition will have to wait for the iPhone 13.)
Even so, nearly every feature has been upgraded, with a focus on what counts: screen, sound, camera, speed.
The iPhone 5 is now a 4G LTE phone, meaning that in certain lucky cities, you get wicked-fast Internet connections. (Verizon has by far the most LTE cities, with AT&T a distant second and Sprint at the rear. Here’s a cool coverage comparison map: j.mp/V5wEwN.)
The phone itself runs faster, too. Its new processor runs twice as fast, says Apple. Few people complained about the old phone’s speed, but this one certainly zips.
The screen now has better color reproduction. The front-facing camera captures high-definition video now (720p). The battery offers the same talk time as before (eight hours), but adds two more hours of Web browsing (eight hours), even on LTE networks. In practical terms, you encounter fewer days when the battery dies by dinnertime — a frequent occurrence with 4G phones.
The camera is among the best ever put into a phone. Its lowlight shots blow away the same efforts from an iPhone 4S. Its shot-to-shot times have been improved by 40 percent. And you can take stills even while recording video (1080p hi-def, of course).
So far, so good. But now, the third point, about universal compatibility.
These days, that decade-old iPhone/iPad/iPod charging connector is everywhere: cars, clocks, speakers, docks, even medical devices. But the new iPhone won’t fit any of them.
Apple calls its replacement the Lightning connector. It’s much sturdier than the old jack, and much smaller — 0.31 inch wide instead of 0.83. And there’s no right side up — you can insert it either way. It clicks satisfyingly into place, yet you can remove it easily. It’s the very model of a modern major connector.
Well, great. But it doesn’t fit any existing accessories, docks or chargers. Apple sells an adapter plug for $30 (or $40 with an eight-inch cable “tail”). If you have a few accessories, you could easily pay $150 in adapters for a $200 phone. That’s not just a slap in the face to loyal customers — it’s a jab in the eye.
Even with the adapter, not all accessories work with the Lightning, and not all the features of the old connector are available; for example, you can’t send the iPhone’s video out to a TV cable.
Apple says that a change was inevitable — that old connector, after 10 years, desperately needed an update. Still, Apple has just given away one of its greatest competitive advantages.
The phone comes with new software, iOS 6, bristling with large and small improvements — and it’s a free download that also runs on the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S.

Covering the World of Business, Digital Only

The Media Equation

Covering the World of Business, Digital Only

Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times
“I love the romance of print,” said David G. Bradley, owner of Atlantic Media, but it has cost him.
Business titans are generally not prone to self-appraisal, and when they do take stock, it usually begins and ends with a list of their conquests.
David G. Bradley, the owner of Atlantic Media, has never been like that. He built and then sold the Advisory Board and the Corporate Executive Board, two research advisory firms, but he never trumpeted that or his fancy education — he was a Fulbright scholar with a law degree from Georgetown and an M.B.A. from Harvard — as a significant credential.
When I worked for him — briefly — and then covered him, he made an impression because underneath his waspy, patrician manner he had a very practical understanding of his own limitations, and as a result, Mr. Bradley, 59, is a bit of a brain collector, seeking out intellectual talent and listening closely at every turn.
At lunch a few weeks ago, we talked about Quartz, Atlantic’s new, strictly digital play in global media, a site for business news that is making its debut on Monday at qz.com. He was clearly excited about the new enterprise, but Mr. Bradley spoke candidly about his costly education in the economics of publishing.
“It was expensive and painful,” he said. “I clearly didn’t know what I was getting into.”
After selling his shares in his companies for a reported after-tax gain of $300 million in 1997 and realizing he didn’t have the people’s touch when it came to politics — his first love — he had hoped to buy Newsweek. But that did not work out. So in 1998 he bought The Atlantic Monthly instead, along with National Journal and Government Executive, in part because he wanted to be a Beltway player and in part because he loved the physical aspects of print.
He hoped to turn The Atlantic into a weekly, a glossy artifact that he could proudly display in his office at the Watergate complex, overlooking the Potomac River. But even as a monthly, the economics were baffling.
I called him back after our lunch and he repeated something he had said.
“In a sense, I was born 50 years too late,” he said. “I love the romance of print, but after I took over The Atlantic, I quickly began losing $8 to $10 million a year. It was not a sustainable business, no matter how much I loved being part of it.”
After spending 10 years and $100 million on the Atlantic brand, he realized that making baubles for the coffee table would soon leave him bereft. He hired Justin Smith, the publisher of The Week who had also worked at The Economist, in 2007. Mr. Smith has Mr. Bradley’s polish, but is more ruthless in business matters and less sentimental about print. The pair set about building a ladder out of the hole that the company — and most of print publishing, for that matter — found itself in.
What is the way forward for a 155-year old-magazine that once published Emerson and Longfellow? Digital first and last, with ancillary revenue from conferences. The magazine, edited by James Bennet, is still very much in the middle of the conversation, but these days it is prized mostly for bringing luster to digital assets like TheAtlantic.com, Atlantic Wire, Atlantic Cities, and beginning Monday, Quartz.
Mr. Bradley shared the financials that suggested that revenue at the various Atlantic properties had doubled in the last four years, from $20 million to $40 million, and that the company was profitable for the third year in a row. Digital revenue, he said, now makes up 65 percent of all advertising revenue. (Even though Atlantic Media is a private company, I believe Mr. Bradley; he was always honest when he was losing gobs of money, so I have no reason to doubt him now that he says they are in the black).
“It’s become very, very clear to me that digital trumps print, and that pure digital, without any legacy costs, massively trumps print,” Mr. Bradley said.
At a time when other media properties are leaning hard on subscriptions and paywalls, Mr. Smith believes that a free product, with revenue from sponsorships and events, can avoid the dependency on commodity ads and play in more rarefied, lucrative terrain.
“We don’t want to be the Royal Navy,” he said. “We want to be the pirate ship attacking the Royal Navy. I’m bearish on print, including our own. It is an inexorable trend that has to be met with some very radical changes.”

Disruptions: Will Apple Be the First to Break $1 Trillion?

Disruptions: Will Apple Be the First to Break $1 Trillion?

Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, at the introduction of the iPhone 5.Eric Risberg/Associated Press Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, at the introduction of the iPhone 5.
If Apple continues on its current trajectory, something remarkable might happen on April 9, 2015, at around 11 a.m.
That is, statisticians and investors I’ve spoken with say, a conservative estimate of when Apple could become the first company ever to be valued at $1 trillion. (Yes, you read that correctly: the number one, followed by 12 zeros.)

 

‘Cybergeddon,’ With Missy Peregrym, Hits Yahoo

A Yahoo Series About Cyberterrorism

‘Cybergeddon,’ With Missy Peregrym, Hits Yahoo

Yahoo
Missy Peregrym in “Cybergeddon.”
When you’ve created “CSI,” you don’t have a lot left to prove in the entertainment business. But Anthony E. Zuiker isn’t resting on his television laurels. He writes multiplatform “digi-novels” and is a partner in a YouTube channel, BlackBoxTV, that has more than 333,000 subscribers.
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Now Mr. Zuiker is taking his biggest step so far into new media with “Cybergeddon,” a nine-part series that will be released, beginning on Tuesday, on the Yahoo! Screen video site.
An executive producer, along with Matthew Weinberg and Bill O’Dowd, Mr. Zuiker is calling the video — which should total about 95 minutes and be available in 10 languages — a “motion picture event” distributed in installments directly to Yahoo’s huge worldwide audience, should that audience happen to find it. (It has its own tab at the top of the Yahoo! Screen home page.)
Judging from the first three installments, “event” might be an optimistic description of “Cybergeddon,” but “better than your average TV-movie thriller” probably fits. Written by Miles Chapman (“Roadhouse 2: Last Call”) and directed by Diego Velasco (“The Zero Hour”), it would look at home on the Syfy or USA channels and has a network star, Missy Peregrym of the ABC series “Rookie Blue.”
Mr. Zuiker’s show is a conspiracy tale, as was Yahoo’s first original drama, the animated series “Electric City,” created by Tom Hanks, which went up in July. But Mr. Hanks’s was set in a dreamy, postapocalyptic steam-punk future.
“Cybergeddon” is very much in the here and now, positing a malevolent European criminal mastermind (Olivier Martinez, Diane Lane’s lust object in “Unfaithful”), who begins a seemingly random series of digital attacks: the controls of a Los Angeles water plant, the accounts of a Hong Kong bank.
Ms. Peregrym plays a coldly ambitious F.B.I. agent who spots the pattern but, before the first 10-minute episode ends, has been framed and arrested for cyberterrorism herself. This is not a show in which you want to sweat the plot details.
This all happens quickly, as Mr. Chapman and Mr. Velasco, operating under standard Web video rules, squeeze more twists into each 10-to-11-minute episode than it should have to bear, a feat accomplished with the help of rat-a-tat dialogue out of an old movie serial. (“Agent Jocelyn! You’re under arrest on three counts of cyberterrorism!” “Are you kidding me?”)
Another sign that we’re online: Ms. Peregrym’s cleavage plays a larger role per minute than it does in prime time on “Rookie Blue.”
Ms. Peregrym, whose distinguishing characteristics as an actress are her sad eyes and her athleticism, makes a credible action hero but is perhaps not as convincing a tech genius. Helping Agent Jocelyn in her quest to clear her name and stop the cyberattacks is a jailed hacker named Rabbit, amusingly played by the Australian actor Kick Gurry.
It would be wrong to leave a discussion of “Cybergeddon” without mentioning the commercial impediments to unfettered creativity in online drama. Among the logos prominently displayed in the opening credits is that of the digital-security company Symantec, which served as a consultant to the production but also has a significant role in the story.
This isn’t the kind of product placement in which a company’s car or navigation system is used by the heroine — this is the kind in which a sponsor is turned into a heroic character.
Producers can make all the excuses they want, but that kind of synergy puts a hard cap on how seriously their work can be taken.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 24, 2012
An earlier version of this article included a headline that misidentified the Web site where the series “Cybergeddon” is being published. It is Yahoo Screen, not YouTube.

isruptions: Your Brain on E-Books and Smartphone Apps

isruptions: Your Brain on E-Books and Smartphone Apps

Michael Appleton for The New York Times
Last week, my brain played a cruel trick on me. While waiting for my flight to take off, I was reading The New Yorker, the paper version, of course — I know the rules. I became engrossed in an article and swiped my finger down the glossy page to read more.
To my surprise, nothing happened. I swiped it again. Nothing.
My brain was trying to turn the page the same way I do on my iPad, with the swipe of a finger. (I quickly realized that I had to physically turn the page.)
A few days later, my brain played another technology-related trick. In New York City, I hopped in a cab and told the driver, “59th and 6th, please.” I didn’t think anything of it when we arrived at my destination and I said thanks and hopped out of the cab, without paying.
The cabby yelled at me bluntly, clearly not very happy: “These taxis aren’t free. Are you gonna pay me?”
I quickly apologized and paid him — with a good tip — when I realized that my brain thought I was in an Uber car, not a taxi.
In San Francisco, where I live, I often use a car service called Uber when I go out for the evening. You order a car from your smartphone, it arrives, you get in, tell your driver where to go, and then get out at your destination. There is no money exchanged; your credit card is automatically billed after the trip, and you are e-mailed a receipt.
But I did spend a few moments standing at the curb trying to figure out if I was suffering from some sort of mental fatigue.
I called the closest thing to a technology doctor I know: Clifford Nass, a professor of cognitive science and communications at Stanford University, and the author of “The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships.”
“Brains love habits; brains are built for efficiency,” Mr. Nass said, noting that I wasn’t sick, maybe just a little too technological for my own good. “Our brains are built to put two things together in space and time and then say, ‘Great, I can remember that these go together.’ Then we execute on that, like you trying to scroll down a piece of paper with your finger.”
Although videos have been floating around the Web showing 1- and 2-year-olds trying to use a magazine like an iPad, you would think a 36-year-old man would know the difference. Gary Small, director of the Longevity Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, has performed studies showing that the human brain adapts to technology in seven days, regardless of age.
I rarely read things on paper anymore. Magazines, news articles and books are all consumed on touch-screen devices like iPads, smartphones and Kindles. (The content is the same; the device is different.) Mr. Nass explained that my brain had been habituated to change the page by sliding my finger, no matter what I read. (This is also why I uselessly swipe ATM monitors or my laptop screen.) The same thing is happening with the taxi: my brain categorizes any car I am not driving as an Uber car.
All of these brain changes hasten the adoption rate for technologies, Mr. Nass said. It’s what happened with the telephone or the use of cruise control in cars. “You no longer drive a car,” he said. “You use a car.”
What is now happening with reading, we will soon experience with paying for things without cash, check or credit cards. And it will happen quickly.
The slowest part of the process may be convincing businesses to produce the changes. “This is where businesses have a difficult time adapting to what’s happening in society,” Mr. Nass said. It wasn’t publishers, for example, who introduced electronic reading devices. “People entered the publishing industry because they loved the feel and smell of books.”
But if they don’t recognize the speed of these changes, their brains are playing tricks on them, too.