Intel, not Microsoft, that offers vision for computing

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CES 2012

Intel’s Mooly Eden showed off what the computers of the future will look like: ultra-thin, voice-recognising, touch-sensitive, these are the devices that will shape the homes and workplaces of the future. And as Eden said, it’s not about processor speeds or advanced specifications as far as consumers are concerned: so he showed off blazingly fast graphics by blowing up a simulated bridge.
Most interesting features were the suggestions that forthcoming ultrabook laptops will incorporate touch, so that zooming in on a webpage will be as easy as it is on a tablet currently, but typing will offer the familiar laptop experience. For the first time, both touching and typing seemed to add up to more than the sum of their parts. The Nikiski concept laptop, meanwhile, includes a giant, transparent touchscreen – when it’s folded up you can still see all the useful bits of your schedule, courtesy of Windows 8’s mobile phone style interface.

So too is Windows 8 itself – Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer showed off a clever ‘picture unlock’ facility, where users touch the right parts of a picture to unlock their phone or tablet. It’s cute and fun but also functional. Indeed, many of the existing, elegant features of Windows 8 were shown of deftly – but Ballmer’s speech was still not enough to keep everyone in the room until the end. IN many, ways, perhaps, he was proving Microsoft’s reasons for leaving the show: just after Christmas, there’s nothing in the product cycle to shout about.

Intel, meanwhile, almost casually showed off a feature that lets users throw virtual object at a computer which then appear on screen. It’s exactly what Microsoft showed off with Kinect’s Sesame Street integration later. Except Intel didn’t make a fuss about the software, they just showed what it can do. And that’s the problem – increasingly and largely thanks to Apple, consumers don’t want to know what computers do, they just want them to get out of the way and let them get on with doing it elegantly and easily. So Intel can get people excited about beautiful laptops and about what their chips enable.