I have a number of fellow geek friends who are deeply distressed by the current trend in computerized gadgetry, in particular, the iPhone and the much rumoured, but, as of this writing, still entirely vapourware Apple tablet device.

Myself, I think it’s pretty much where the industry’s been heading since the day the first truly retail home computers hit the market, and more to the point, I think it’s exactly what they should be doing.

Specifically, these friends are concerned about the restricted ecosystem on these devices. Unless you “jailbreak” your iPhone, for example, you only have three possible sources for applications on the device:

1. The ones that Apple ships with the device’s OS. Apple originally wanted this to be the whole of the story, by the way, but realized even before release that that would never do.
2. The Apple-supported–and Apple controlled–App Store. Mind you, there are thousands of apps, covering virtually every area of functionality the device is capable of (but with some glaring, deliberate gaps), but it’s still entirely under Apple’s control.
3. Write your own. There is nothing stopping you loading code you write yourself via Apple’s software developer kit onto your phone–how else, after all, would you test it? You just can’t distribute it in a way that other people can load it, except via the App Store.

This, of course, gives Apple what they consider to be inordinate control over “their” device. The argument goes: they bought it, so they should be able to load any software they want on it.

To which I say: fine. Don’t buy an iPhone or an upcoming iPad. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but you’re not really Apple’s target audience.

Apple’s target audience is, and always has been, the non-geek. The person who has heard that they can do things they already do every day more easily with a computer; or new and different things with a computer; but really doesn’t want to have to understand anything about computers to make it all go. They want it to be easy to use, and they want it to work. They don’t want to have to debug it. They don’t write their own code. And they’re perfectly happy getting their applications through a handy store where someone has done at least a little bit of quality checking and making sure it won’t turn their device into a brick.

Now me? I am, of course, a geek. A deep geek. An utter nerd. I write code for a living, and love writing code for a living.

However, I have neither desire, nor need, to write code for my telephone.

The fact that my telephone–which I really think as a network access device with voice capability as an option, because I don’t really like talking on the telephone–the fact that it happens to be a computer, which could theoretically run any one of a large number of programs if I or someone else chose is utterly irrelevant to me. That’s not what I want it for. I want a phone that can surf the net and read my e-mail and allow me to send text messages. The fact that it also has some extremely useful applications (like the ones I use to track my exercise and my blood sugar) is a fantastic bonus that makes those things easier for me.

I don’t need to write them myself. I don’t need to change them. I don’t give a damn if they’re open source or not. I want a few apps to do a few things that make my life easier. If they work well, I keep them. If they don’t, I ditch them. And that’s all.

As I was writing this article, my friend Bryan (writer of You Are Dumb and Forkbastard ) opined in an instant message that this would have to be a “fairly magical box to justify a starting price of $600 for something running iPhone OS”. And I disagreed.

There is nothing that the average consumer needs in such a device that the iPhone OS can’t deliver, and in a fashion far easier to use than OS X or Windows.

There is only one feature missing from the iPhone OS (which is really just OS X reskinned, anyway) that some users would find useful: multitasking. The ability to have multiple programs actually operating at the same time, and not just have them remember their state when swapped out. Right now, if you have an iPhone, and you are, say, surfing the web, and you hit the Home button and switch away to do something else, the web browser actually stops running while you’re doing other things.

This is not an actual technical or structural limitation of iPhone OS. It’s a deliberate choice Apple’s engineers made to preserve battery life and improve system stability by limiting what the processor has to focus on at any given moment to what the user is most interested in–the application currently in the foreground.

That said, there are already exceptions to this. Mail runs continually in the background, for example. So does the SMS application, and the software responsible for actually recognizing and notifying you of a phone call. Finally, with iPhone 3.0, there’s also a process that collects other application’s notifications and presents them to you–a single background task so that all the other apps don’t need to run that way.

For a small, consumer-oriented device, I think that’s all pretty reasonable. I think there have been exactly two occasions in the 3 years I’ve owned an iPhone where I wished something could be running in the background, and that was more about me having ADD and not wanting to have to wait for Twitter to load on a slow network link than something I really needed to do.

So no, folks, this is not the Death of Computing. Someone does, after all, still have to write the apps that sell through the App Store.

But more to the point, if you’re already a geek working a geeky job, this device is never going to–never intended to–replace the sorts of devices or operating environments you use to do your work. This is a consumer device, period.

And that’s not a bad thing.