好英语网乔布斯是对的：手机和iPad杀死了个人电脑
I got an iPad Pro recently, and I’ve fallen madly in love with it.
我最近得到一台iPad Pro，并且深深爱上了它。
This was unexpected. I’ve had iPads before, but like a lot of people, I hadn’t found them to be very useful. Tablets were good for surfing the Web and watching Netflix, but they’ve always been dogged by the charge that you couldn’t get a lot of work done on them.
这出乎我的意料。我以前也用过iPad，但和很多人一样，我觉得它用处不大。平板电脑本来很适合上网、看Netflix，但它们总被指责没法用来做太多工作。
Apple’s latest iPads are different. Not only can you get work done on them; in many ways they’re productivity dream machines. Today’s iPads are powered by custom-designed processors that are faster than the chips on some of the Macs Apple makes, and the iPad’s separately sold keyboard is better and more durable than the accursed, falling-apart mess of a keyboard that Apple is shipping on its much-maligned current line of laptops.
苹果最新的iPad与众不同。你不仅可以用它来完成工作；在很多方面，它是人们梦寐以求的生产力工具。今天的iPad使用特别设计的处理器，速度比某几款Mac电脑的芯片还快；为iPad单独发售的键盘更好、更耐用，远胜苹果为其目前备受诟病的笔记本产品线配备的破烂糟糕的键盘。
史蒂夫·乔布斯在2010年推出iPad。
Apple unveiled a new 16-inch MacBook with a revamped keyboard on Wednesday, good news for the many Apple lovers who’ve been grumbling about the company’s lackluster slate of recent Macs. But I think the iPad is already beginning to eclipse the traditional personal computer. In the four months I’ve had this latest model, the iPad Pro has eaten into the time I spend on my phone and my old-school laptop and desktop. Among other things, I now research and write just about every column using an iPad (I still compose many first drafts by speaking into my headphones, but I’m an odd duck).
苹果公司于周三发布了一款全新的16英寸MacBook，键盘经过了改进，这对很多一直抱怨最近几款Mac电脑缺乏亮点的苹果爱好者来说是个好消息。但我认为iPad已经开始超越传统个人电脑。在我购买了这款最新机型的四个月里，iPad Pro吞噬了我本来花在手机、老式笔记本电脑和台式机上的时间。特别是，我现在几乎所有专栏文章的案头和撰写都是用iPad（我仍然通过对着耳机说话来写许多初稿，但我是个怪人）。
I thought I had gotten out of the gadget-reviewing business for good last year. Since the smartphone had gobbled up everything from cameras to music players to portable gaming systems, I declared the whole field of gadgetry dead. But just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.
去年，我以为自己永远离开了电子产品评测行业。由于智能手机吞噬了从相机到音乐播放器再到便携游戏系统的一切，我宣告整个电子设备领域的死亡。但就在我以为自己出局的时候，它们又把我拉了回来。
The history of the iPad is a story about consolidation, focus and the power of scale in the tech business. It’s a story about how thoroughly one company, Apple, has dominated the entire hardware business this decade. And it is also, really, a story about the only thing that mattered in tech in the 2010s — the smartphone — and the way that one device became the gravitational center of the entire tech business, shaping every market in the industry, and much of the non-tech world beyond it.
IPad的历史是一则技术行业整合、聚焦和规模化力量的故事，是关于苹果公司如何彻底统治整个硬件行业的故事。而且，真的，它也关乎2010年代科技产业内唯一一件重要的东西——智能手机——以及一个设备怎样成为整个技术企业的中心，塑造着技术行业的每一个市场，以及它自身之外非技术世界的大部分市场。
The iPad has always been freighted with great expectations. Although the iPad was unveiled in 2010, three years after the iPhone, development of the iPad predated development of the phone, and Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, always seemed to have his heart in the tablet.
人们对iPad一直抱有很大的期待。尽管是在iPhone发布三年后的2010年发布的，iPad的开发早于iPhone，而苹果的联合创始人史蒂夫·乔布斯(Steve Jobs)似乎总对平板电脑情有独钟。
In one of his last interviews before his death in 2011, Jobs declared the iPad to be the future of computing. “PCs are going to be like trucks,” he told the journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg — meaning the traditional Mac and Windows machines would still be around, but like big rigs, they’d be used by a small set of power users for a dwindling set of specific, high-power tasks. The “cars” of the tech industry, as Jobs saw it, would be phones and tablets.
2011年乔布斯去世前接受的最后几次采访中，他宣称iPad是计算的未来。“个人电脑将会像卡车一样，”他告诉记者卡拉·斯威舍(Kara Swisher)和沃特·莫斯伯格(Walt Mossberg)——这意味着传统的Mac和Windows电脑仍将存在，但像大型钻机一样，它们将只被一小部分高级用户用于越来越少的特定高强度任务。在乔布斯看来，技术行业的“汽车”将会是手机和平板电脑。
For a while, he was only partially right. The iPad sold well at launch, but after a few years it hit some hurdles. After Jobs’s death, Apple left the iPad to languish, and did something similar with the Mac.
有一段时间，他的话只有部分是正确的。iPad一上市就卖得很好，但几年后就遇到了一些障碍。乔布斯去世后，苹果公司任凭iPad逐渐衰落，对待Mac也同样如此。
Meanwhile, something amazing happened with the iPhone and the many Android-based copycat phones it inspired. In the 2010s, smartphones became more popular, more powerful and more profitable than anyone in the tech industry thought possible. Within a few years, their sales and usage eclipsed that of PCs, and for much of the decade they were the fountain of most new consumer innovations across the technology industry. Smartphones made Uber and Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok possible. Smartphone cameras began to surpass stand-alone cameras, turning much of culture and society into a meme-soaked playground where visual media matters more than text.
与此同时，iPhone和它所激发的许多安卓模仿品也发生了惊人的变化。在2010年代，智能手机变得比技术行业所有人想象中更受欢迎、更强大、更能带来利润。短短几年内，它们的销量和使用量就超过了个人电脑，在过去十年的大部分时间里，它们是技术行业中大多数消费者创新的源泉。智能手机让优步(Uber)、Instagram、Snapchat和TikTok成为可能。智能手机摄像头开始超越专门的相机，把很多文化和社会生活变成了充斥着各种米姆的游乐场，在这里，视觉媒介比文字媒介更重要。
The smartphone also altered the business dynamics of the tech industry. When the iPhone came out, Apple was just one of many successful hardware companies in the world. But the smartphone decimated a host of phone brands (remember Nokia? Motorola?), and as smartphones gained more power, they began making life impossible for a slate of hardware start-ups, from GoPro to Jawbone.
智能手机还改变了科技行业的商业格局。当iPhone问世时，苹果只是世界上众多成功的硬件公司之一。但智能手机摧毁了许多手机品牌（还记得诺基亚吗？）随着智能手机获得了更大的力量，从GoPro到Jawbone等一系列硬件初创企业开始无法生存。
On the strength of the iPhone, Apple began capturing a greater and greater slice of the tech hardware business; although it didn’t sell a majority of units, its commitment to the high end of the market allowed it to make the bulk of profits. In the last quarter of 2017, according to one estimate, Apple made 86 percent of profits in the smartphone industry.
凭借iPhone的力量，苹果开始在科技硬件业务中占据越来越大的份额；虽然它不是把产品出售给大多数人，但致力于高端市场使它获得了大量利润。据估计，在2017年最后一个季度，苹果占据了智能手机行业86%的利润。
Apple’s dominance came despite the fact that the company made some big mistakes and was late to many big innovations. Samsung, not Apple, invented huge-screen phones. Apple’s Mac line was plagued by delays and dead ends, including a 2013 redesign of the Mac Pro that looked like a trash can and proved just as useful. And on the iPad, for many years, Apple just seemed to fall asleep. The iPad’s stylus and keyboard-forward design? Microsoft did it first on the Surface.
苹果公司占据主导地位的同时也犯了一些大错，而且在很多重大创新上都晚了一步。发明大屏幕手机的不是苹果，而是三星。苹果的Mac系列产品频频出现延期，找不到出路，其中包括2013年重新设计的那款看起来像垃圾桶、用起来也差不多的Mac Pro。而在iPad方面，多年来，苹果好像是睡着了。iPad的触控笔和外接键盘设计？这是微软推出的Surface首先实现的。
Yet none of this mattered. Because of its hold on the smartphone business and a very sticky software ecosystem that users found hard to leave, Apple has been able to incorporate many innovations pioneered elsewhere and sell its customers on a series of peripheral billion-dollar businesses, including the Apple Watch and AirPods.
然而这些都不重要。由于其对智能手机业务的控制，以及粘度很高、用户很难离开的的软件生态系统，苹果得以将许多在其他地方开创的创新结合起来，向客户出售一系列价值数十亿美元的外围产品，包括苹果手表和AirPods耳机。
And ultimately, it’s the ecosystem that explains why I can’t stop raving about the iPad. When it came out, the big knock on the iPad was that it was just a big phone; today, that’s what I love about it — like the Watch or AirPods, the iPad feels intuitive and natural to me because it works just like the device I use most often, my phone.
最终，正是这个生态系统解释了我何以对iPad赞不绝口。当iPad刚推出的时候，最大的批评是，它只是一个更大的手机；然而，到了今天，这正是我喜欢它的原因——就像手表或AirPods一样，iPad对我来说感觉直观而自然，因为它的工作方式和我最常用的设备——手机——是一样的。
Like a phone, in most scenarios I find the iPad to be faster, more portable and easier to use and maintain than any traditional P.C. I’ve ever owned. The iPad’s limited screen space and emphasis on full-screen apps also makes for fewer distractions than on a traditional personal computer. The iPad, like my phone, lets me log in to my bank using my face; the Mac, in 2019, doesn’t even have a touch screen.
和手机一样，在大多数场景下，我发现iPad比我曾经用过的任何传统个人电脑更快、更便携、更容易使用和维护。iPad有限的屏幕空间和对全屏应用程序的强调也比传统的个人电脑更能让人专心。iPad和手机一样，可以让我用面部识别登陆银行；而Mac在2019年的今天甚至连触摸屏都没有。
The iPad still can’t do everything a laptop can, and I still have to log in to a “real” computer sometimes. I had a long chat recently with Dan Seifert, the deputy editor of the Verge, who uses an iPad every day on the subway but often finds the device infuriating.
IPad仍然不能做笔记本电脑能做的所有事情，有时我仍然需要登录一台“真”电脑。最近，我与《前沿》(Verge)的副主编丹·塞夫特(Dan Seifert)进行了一次长谈，他每天在地铁上使用iPad，但是经常被它惹得火冒三丈。
“For someone like me, who’s been using a desktop operating system for a long time, there’s a lot of built-in conventions that I’m used to that can be frustrating,” Seifert said. In particular, the iPad doesn’t work with antiquated work flows that are built for PCs. Say you need to log into your company’s bespoke publishing system or expense program? It’s possible those won’t work on your iPad — at least not yet — because they were built for much older devices.
“对于像我这样长期使用台式电脑操作系统的人来说，有很多我已经习惯了的内置约定可以让我很恼火，”塞夫特说。尤其值得一提的是，iPad不支持为个人电脑设计的那些古老工作流程。举例来说，假如你需要登录你们公司的定制发布系统或报销程序？它们可能无法在iPad上使用——至少现在还不行——因为它们是为更老的设备设计的。
But Seifert agreed with me that many of these uses are a special case. He still uses P.C.s because often, in Jobs’s parlance, he needs a truck. Most people, however, don’t need trucks, and few of us will need them in the future. Seifert isn’t teaching his kids how to use desktop operating systems like the Mac or Windows, and neither am I.
但塞夫特同意我的看法，这些用途中有许多是特例。如今他还在使用台式机，因为用乔布斯的话说，他经常需要一辆卡车。然而，大多数人不需要卡车，将来几乎没有人需要它。塞夫特没有教孩子们如何使用Mac或Windows等桌面操作系统，我也没有。
It took longer than he expected, but Steve Jobs was right. Over the past decade, for most people, in most use cases, phones killed the P.C. To get work done, now you just use a big phone — which Apple happens to call an iPad.
虽然花费的时间比他预期的要长，但史蒂夫·乔布斯是对的。在过去十年里，对于大多数人来说，在大多数情况下，手机扼杀了个人电脑。要想完成工作，现在你只需要使用一款大屏手机——苹果公司把它叫做iPad。
