Purpose-built computers

The HomeView launched yesterday, just not in Chile. So I bought one from the US, and right now it’s somewhere in transit down here.

While I wait, I’ve been watching every review I can find. Go watch Joanna Stern’s, it’s nuts. She dresses up as the dad from the ad.

I mostly want it for cooking.¹ Open a recipe in Safari and a little icon shows up on the edge of the screen. Tap it and the page shrinks down to just the recipe: an ingredients list you tick off first, then the steps, one page at a time. It even picks out the timers in the text, the way data detectors pick out a date or a phone number in Mail, so “bake for 25 minutes” turns into something you tap.

Safari? That’s a computer dressed up as an appliance, which is exactly what the i-Opener was.

Netpliance put it out in November 1999: a screen and a keyboard meant for the kitchen counter, for email and the web over dial-up, and nothing else. It cost $99, way less than it took to build, because the monthly subscription was supposed to pay for the rest. It even had a pizza key. Michael MJD’s video tells the whole story:

People figured out pretty quickly that under the plastic it was just a cheap PC. The IDE header on the board had its pins wired in reverse, so all it took was a modified cable to hang an off-the-shelf hard drive off it and install Linux or Windows 98. Netpliance fought back with a new BIOS, epoxy and clipped pins, while losing money on every one it sold. Then they gave up on it, it got even cheaper, and people bought them by the pile to turn into regular computers.

I’d love to be refreshing a forum right now, waiting for a HomeView jailbreak so I can run homebrew on it. Homebrew. On a HomeView. I’m sorry, it’s too fitting.

Maybe the RAM crisis never gets better and we all end up buying HomeViews to do our serious, non-kitchen work on. Looking forward to it.