As Apple goes, so goes the industry. When Apple announced the iMac sans floppy drive, the PC industry proclaimed it a failure, because nobody would buy a computer without a floppy drive. Based on the unprecedented success of the iMac in its many fruity, flowery, and lamp-like incarnations, this prediction was clearly wrong, and the rest of the industry followed. Today, you'll have trouble finding a PC with an included floppy drive.

Recently, Apple released a new MacBook, and while they've emphasized the new case design and environmentally-friendly components, Steve Jobs failed to mention the lack of a FireWire (IEEE 1394) port in the MacBook. We should've seen this coming when the 5th Generation iPods lost their FireWire capabilities, but nobody really cared back then. This absence may well signal the end of the FireWire standard if history repeats itself, or it may signal the end of FireWire being used in consumer-level devices. (Once new iMacs are announced, likely January 5 at the MacWorld Expo, we'll know Apple's plan for sure.) But more importantl;y, what does this mean to consumer-level devices?

In the early days, consumers used computers for programming, word processing, database management, and spreadsheets. Later, internet functions came into play, and media management, creation, and editing became popular. Except for video, none of these require a FireWire port, but with video being the hub of the next generation of computer use, and high definition video being the future, Apple has closed off consumers to the best interface for large video file transfer and editing (not to mention making their own Migration Assistant useless).

What does Apple see as the future of consumer computer use? It seems that consumer applications will soon be limited to "cloud" capabilities, all of which have to be fairly simple due to bandwidth requirements. The MacBook Air also shows a trend toward cloud-exclusive computing with its tiny hard drives. Consequently, while the shape of consumer computing may change, don't expect a major evolution of consumer computing in the near future. Applications like Keynote/Powerpoint should abandon the slideshow paradigm for a more fluid model. iMovie should become more powerful, not less so like it did in iMovie '08. Computing is getting simpler, not just to use, but in capabilities, instead of more innovative. When improved data transfer methods for greater editing capabilities should be emphasized instead of diminished, Apple, the king of creative media, decreases the capability, thus limiting the functionality of its hardware and thus the options for its software.

As computer power continues to increase exponentially, we should expect the capabilities to increase as well, not decrease. I sincerely hope that the MacBook (and all consumer-level notebooks in turn) don't soon become glorified mobile phones and that Apple soon once again makes innovation their priority. The future of home computing would seem to depend on it.