I was so wrong. Well, not exactly wrong. Let me explain. In the past 15 years, I've devoted no small number of column inches to swipes at Apple Computer. Apple, I said, was always just a little too cute and too smug, and it clearly missed the technology march early on in the 1990s. It stuck with RISC and got crushed by CISC. Each launch of each system was greeted by a fawning mainstream media that might as well have been Apple's personal PR team. Each launch also miscalculated demand (good for Apple prices, bad for consumers). Apple took the GUI straight from Xerox Parc and then got righteously indignant when Microsoft did it one better.

Ultimately, Apple lost the technology war. It embraced Intel microprocessors. Then it was I who was too smug and just a little too cute.

But a funny thing happened on the way to enlightenment. All of those chants the Apple cult spouted (easy to use, intuitive, safe, uncomplex, powerful) turned out to be, er, right. Functionality trumps technology.

This is where I'm "not exactly wrong." Technology trumped functionality early in personal-computing design. It had to, because technology enabled functionality. You really couldn't do much until the Pentium came along with a few megs of main memory. Now your laptop has more than you need. Inevitably, the man-machine interface reigns supreme. Apple understood this, even before the transition from technology-driven to function-driven design took place.

Functionality's supremacy is difficult to accept on some levels, because we all admire technological achievement. But its days are over, at least in their former context. For example, the industry is no longer building bigger, faster microprocessors as much as stitching more of them together.

Now, since I've been likened to onetime Digital Equipment co-founder Ken Olsen ("There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home") for espousing this view, let me clarify: Technology, per se, isn't dead, but real innovation in the coming years of the computing game won't come from hardware. What would be nice in hardware? Full mobile wireless networking. Better bandwidth to the home. The rest is usability, pure and simple.

Take the Internet. We're starting to grasp its sophistication as a tool for work and play. But it's still a "flat" tool: Type something, get a response (preferably the desired one), repeat. There is enormous upside in making our Internet experiences not only more robust but also more three-dimensional.

Even Microsoft gets the functionality paradigm. The new version of the Microsoft Office suite is said to have been rebuilt from the ground up. (It had to be, because just-good-enough copycat tools are available free on the Web.)

Still, for a guy who a decade ago said most Apple devotees needed to get a life, my Apple retraction doesn't come easy. Why am I offering it? Because my wife and I got our youngest a Macbook for Christmas. I'd argued for a PC laptop, like a Hewlett-Packard brand, because you can find better prices than you can for trendy Macs. I lost that battle, partly because my wife thought trendy would appeal to the teen.

What really hit me Christmas day was that, right out of the box, the Macbook worked. Not like a computer should work--like a consumer product should work. It booted up and self-configured for our wireless network and other things, and literally within three minutes, our son was taking photos and e-mailing them to friends from the Webcam in the laptop. The machine has a remote-control device so that, assuming the laptop is networked with, say, speakers or a larger screen, you can run your music software from across the room. You just can't do that with a PC laptop. HP is trying, but it's not there yet.

Last week, my son, his sister and their cousins spent an hour posing in front of the Macbook's camera and playing with the image distortion options, taking pictures, IMing friends. For the better part of the past three decades when Dell, HP, Compaq or Toshiba designed a laptop, they weren't looking at it as a social device. They were looking at it as an engineering feat.

Our son goes nowhere without his new laptop. He sleeps with it on his nightstand.

Apple gets this. It knows that a lot of colleges and even some high schools are admitting new students and giving them a laptop for the duration because that's now the interface to the world.

This is no great revelation: We've understood for a long time how Apple thinks. But the user-focused success of its latest design has implications all along the electronics food chain.

The era of usability, of the man-machine interface, is now in full flower. It applies to the next EDA tools and multimedia chips just as much as it does to a laptop sold at Best Buy. Ignore this dynamic at your peril.

Into the blogosphere

The blogs cover some of the most important techno- business areas of the day: semiconductors, EDA, consumer, communications, computing, Asia and the industry at large. They're owned by, respectively, Mark LaPedus, Richard Goering, Dylan McGrath, Loring Wirbel, Rick Merritt, Mike Clendenin and myself. Each day, EE Times editors are tasked with surveying their beats to determine the best stories of the day and the week and how best to present them--whether as a microscoop or opinion posted on a blog, a more formal EETimes.com news story or a news analysis tailored for the reflective reading habits of our print audience.

The blogs are another great offering in our online portfolio, which has consistently evolved since we launched EETimes.com back in 1994. Check them out every day at eetimes.com/blog/news.