Will the Litl be the next Apple Computer?

It was January 24, 1984 when the first Macintosh said, “hello”. It was the first successful personal computer that used images, rather than text to interact with the user. It wasn’t by far the first computer to have a graphical user interface and a mouse. A decade later, PCs would standardize on the concept through Windows and the rest as people say, has been history. Twenty five years later, the world as we know it is little changed from that first Macintosh design. Much of our computing relies on point and click. And much of our computing hardware follows the same pattern as that first PC that came out in 1981.

The past decade has been an experiment in different user interfaces. More and more the trend has been to make the machine humanized. From gestures to different user interfaces for our devices. iPhone OS was the commercialization of it.  The commercial success of iPhone OS is spectacular. Say what you will about the borked AppStore process but the device and OS itself is revolutionary. iPhone OS is years ahead of what companies like Google and Palm are coming out with. Don’t even get started with the whole Microsoft genre, which seem tired and uninteresting.

As these experiments on software evolve, computer hardware design itself is also changing.  The Litl is a small computer company with big ideas is one such experiment. Will the Litl be the next Apple?  The look is a lot better than most netbooks in the market.  The interface focuses on people’s digital lifestyle.  Yet, it seems archaic now to have a new computer that didn’t sport a touch interface. The easy of use that they are attempting is what computers should be: they work for you, not you working for the machine.

And today, Google introduces Chrome OS. It is Google’s Chrome browser that runs on top of a Linux kernel and it is built for Netbooks.

With Chrome OS making the Web its central focus, are we finally seeing the first glimpse of a universe of cloud?

In five years, it becomes riveting what companies like Dell and Sony can do with this, what they can innovate from the loosening of the OS grip. It would be highly interesting what Mac OS X will look like in five years. So what of the desktop? Oh, yeah, we’ll still use those. Doctors, Designers, Engineers, Scientists need machines to build, study, develop things and in time, those too will change as new user interfaces work for us. It would be wonderful to see how this field changes the way people use computers. Computing becomes exciting and fun again. Computers work for us and are extensions of our will.