Remember the Digital Hub?

It's still here.

Don't remember it? Take a trip down memory lane to January 2001 and refresh your memory:

Pete Mortensen was right:

You see, I’ve been thinking a lot about Apple and its insane run of success over the last nine years. Consider this: in 2001, Apple’s revenue was about $6.5 billion. In 2009, that revenue was $42.3 billion. Essentially, the company grew by more than 550 percent in eight years. How exactly is that possible? Was it the great products? Partly. Great leadership? Sure. Killer marketing? No question. But more than all of those combined, the secret to Apple’s success was that it defined and followed the right strategy and the right era. Steve Jobs is king of the world right now because he hit on the idea for the Digital Hub.

If you’ve never heard this term before, or its meaning has faded, take a look back at the video at the top of this piece. It’s the most important moment in the modern era of Apple. It’s not the day the iPod was announced, it’s not when the iPhone descended from the heavens. Instead, it’s the day that Steve Jobs defined what computing would mean in the next decade.

It's been almost 13 years since Wired summed up everyone's thoughts on a dying Apple Computer with one word:

Although the advice in the feature article — in hindsight — was almost all insane, Wired was right on the money about one thing. That year, Apple posted a net loss of almost $1.05 billion and its stock sank to a 12-year low. With only $1.8 billion of cash on hand, creditors were getting nervous about continuing to lend Apple money. Barring a miracle, Apple Computer Inc. was staring bankruptcy right in the face.

But as it happened, the miracle had occurred months before the now-famous June issue went to press, when Apple purchased NeXT for $402 million from Steve Jobs. Back at the helm of Apple and armed with a robust yet nimble operating system, he brought Apple back from the brink — then he set about using it as a platform to make his vision of computing in the future a reality. The Digital Hub was a a line drawn in the sand. Beyond it was not an art deco jetpack future, but a future where photographs aren't stuffed in binders and hidden on bookshelves, never to be seen again. A future where all the music you own fits in your pocket. A world where that device is also a phone, as well as a video-playing Internet device. A future that demands that we are no longer made to work for computers; that computing is made work for us.

I love books. I've got hundreds of them. By far the majority of my belongings are books. There's simply nothing like curling up with a good book. They're (usually) just the right size for it. They're easy-to-use, they're portable, they're high-resolution — what's not to like?

Well, they're heavy, for starters. Moving them is a pain in the ass. They take up a LOT of space. They go out of print. They're made of paper, which decays over time and is prone to getting ripped, crumpled, burned or otherwise damaged. It creates a lot of waste, as the publishing industry has spoilage built-in to their business model, sending the masses of unsold books directly into the recycling. (And sometimes even straight to the trash.) It takes a lot of money and energy to transport them all around the country, adding middlemen which drive up costs even further. And on top of all that, they're not hyperlinked and their search functionality blows goats for beer money.

I used to say many of those things with regard to my music collection. Now the whole damn thing fits in my pocket. (And makes phone calls, fetches my email and tweets and Facebook updates, plays games, and on and on.)

When do I get to say the same about my books? This is supposed to be the future, remember? Heywood Floyd had a little tablet called a Newspad that he took with him on his trip to the moon in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even Star Trek had people running around with C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower books on their PADDs.

I have 8GB of data storage on the same keychain that my house key is on. My phone receives satellite imagery over the Internet, automatically plotting out the best way to reach wherever it is I'm going from wherever I am. My entire music collection fits in my pocket. And if I lose it or it gets destroyed, I can go home to my digital hub and remotely wipe the device over the Internet, then restore from a backup onto the replacement device. I do video chats and screen sharing fairly often. Maybe I don't have a flying car, but have you actually seen the new Prius? It sure looks like we're living in the future.

Meanwhile, my books continue to sit on bookshelves, numerous bookmarks stuck in many of them for future reference. (Where the hell's the search function on these things?) And when I move, I have to box them all up and carry them and then put them all back up on bookcases using a disjointed sorting method that has to take the physical size of the shelves into account.

Enter the iPad.

Sure, there's other ebook readers out there. But they're specialist devices. They do one thing and one thing only: they read ebooks. The iPad, however, follows the trend of consumer electronics, which is towards convergence devices. It's not just an ebook reader. It's also a web browser, an email client, a day calendar, a video player, a gaming machine, and so on.

When I was a teenager, back in the Dark Ages of Personal Computing (read: the 1990s), I carried a backpack around with me wherever I went. In it were a menagerie of objects: usually a book or two; a notepad for writing; a sketchbook for, well, sketching; pencils, erasers, pens and markers; a walkman (and later, one that could play CDs!); various tapes (or CDs) to listen to; an address book; a Game Boy and usually at least a couple games — the list went on. These days, I get much of that in something that fits in my pocket and weighs only 135g.

I travel a lot. A few years ago, I took my iBook everywhere. I even brought it with me to the Netherlands in 2007. (Although it was a 14" G4 by then.) It sure beat the hell out of all the crap I'd cram into my backpack a decade prior, but that thing sure was heavy! It was not the kind of thing you wanted wearing down your shoulders all day as you walked around. And if I wanted to slip into a café to do some writing or other work, I had to also lug along the power adapter and hope to hell the place had a power outlet.

When I took my trip to Europe in 2008, I had the then-still-new iPhone and decided I would try leaving the iBook at home. What I found was that it handled many of the things I would have used a notebook for, although not particularly well. There were still a few things where it would have been nice to have something a little bit larger and more capable. A notebook would have been a bit more optimal than the iPhone, but it would have also been overkill. I don't want to take the whole damned Hub with me when I travel. But then notebooks were still the only game in town. When the MacBook Air came out, I thought that was the answer to the various needs and wants I was trying to balance.

But now, why the hell would I even need to get another notebook at all? It does just enough for what I want in a device I travel with, but I can also use it around the house. It sure seems like I'm the kind of person Apple is targeting with the iPad. And if that device happens to look and feel like something straight out of Star Trek, so much the better. This is the future, remember?

The reactions to the device have been mixed. I must admit that even I will probably wait for the 2nd generation hardware. (Although I might spring for the 1st generation for development purposes, if I happen to have the money. I do see a lot of potential for games on the device.) But make no mistake: the iPad is going to be big. Jon Stokes put it better than I could have in his hot-off-the-presses Ars Technica feature:

None of this is to say that the iPad won't fundamentally change the game. It's just that this launch is closer to that of the original iPod—the idea itself isn't exactly new, competing offerings seem arguably better in some respects, and Apple will have to set itself apart from the pack by delivering a superior user and e-commerce experience. In other words, the iPad isn't going to waltz in and just change the world, the way that its smaller predecessor, the iPhone, did. It'll have to fight its way to the top, like the iPod.

And from the looks of it, it's going to be a helluva fight.