The children of the post-PC future will only have access to iPads. Or Kindle Fires, as pure a consumption device as I can imagine.
Why would you think that would happen?
And while I'm at it, why is "consumption device" an insult? Books are consumption devices. Nobody sneers at a child with a book.
It's not an insult. But consumption devices are lamentable as far as they replace production devices. I love books, and I don't sneer at children who read them. But I would like all children to have access and exposure to writing tools so they realize that they too make books.
Sure, the modern pace of life makes writing and printing a book seem difficult but at the time modern books were a fantastic democritization of the ability to produce literature and distribute ideas compared to the status quo of being illiterate and going to church to be read to by those with access to the books.
But I think the author's point is that part of his penchant for making is due to exposure as a child. In a post-PC era, even if professionals still have PCs, many fewer people will than do today, because they won't need them. That means fewer people, fewer children will be exposed to them as the author was. I think it's a valid concern.
There may be fewer of these sitting around living rooms. But a greater proportion will be available to dual-boot as Dad won't be so worried about losing his TurboTax data.
The devices supplementing or supplanting them will give kids access to the entire library of human writing prior to 1900, plus an extraordinary ability to review art and musical history. They'll be one copyright violation away from K&R. They will essentially be dropped into the Library of Congress, with the Louvre and the Hermitage bolted on at one annex. In the basement will be the nightclubs of Harlem and the salons of Vienna. This is before anyone uses these things for anything _new_. And these contraptions are somehow _limiting_?
Nor will they remain closed. Proprietary tablet systems will suffer the same relentless competition that has grown $600 of desktop from pipe-dream to humdrum commodity. People and companies will code these things precisely to match the capabilities, and revenues, now locked away.
I get the philosophic distaste for closed systems. But haven't the past ten years demonstrated that, in a free market, they can't stay closed? Or that the revenues available to proprietary innovators can motivate accelerations in innovation? Worries about "closed" were one thing in 1995 when people thought they were doomed to Windows. Maybe it's time to adjust the anxieties for what we've seen of the long-term competitiveness of "open".
I suppose I (personally) think it's generally inevitable (and even mostly good!) that machines continue to evolve the way they are doing now - "good" primarily because the newer types of systems provide so much more creative power to non-engineering types, which make up the majority of people.
But, as someone who is deeply interested in computers today primarily because of the power that was available to me as a young child on an early PC, I think that one of the most noble goods that can be done for the future is to provide tools to allow future generations to have access to similar capabilities for exploration and design like we had. The most obvious way to do so seems to me to be "open Web" tools. Web stuff that lets kids play the way we did in BASIC (hopefully even better!) seems like a really good thing to me.