Fri, Jan 29, 2010 11:09 AM
When Apple released their Macintosh IIfx, it was touted as a revolutionary machine, "wicked fast". Code-named "Stealth" and "Blackbird", it had a new motherboard architecture that featured custom coprocessors making it, as Steve Jobs said at the time, "the first zero-wait-state computer". Exciting stuff.
But still, something in the deep recesses of my lower brain told me it would be a short-lived architecture. I don't really know why, but after I finished the issue of MacWeek describing it I turned to a coworker and said, "I give it 18 months." I was off by six: Apple discontinued the model two years later, replacing the line with a different architecture which dropped much of the proprietary chipset that few developers had bothered to compile for.
In the late '90s I saw how much Apple was spending on R&D making their PowerPC chips, and by that time
I'd used enough Intel-based machines that I risked the wrath of a few of my fellow Mac friends by suggesting Apple would do well to move their computers to Intel. My friends tried to explain to me the many benefits of the superior PPC architecture, but I maintained that compelling as they may be they weren't quite enough to offset the massive additional expense.
Over time, with Intel supported by pretty much the entire rest of the industry while Apple was the only mainstream computer manufacturer using PPC, whatever performance advantages had favored PPC began to give way to Intel's advances, and in 2005 Apple switched to Intel for all computers going forward.
Sometime around the turn of this century I had been using two- and three-button mouse-driven OSes (Windows, Sun OS, and Irix) just long enough that it seemed reasonable to suggest that Apple would one day ship with a multi-button mouse. The OS already supported third-party multi-button mice, but using an Apple mouse at the time required you to use the cumbersome Control-click to access contextual menus. Ugh. Even Bruce Tognazini, who had founded Apple's Human Interface Group, said "The two-button mouse is seven or eight years overdue."
But oh did I catch hell for that one too, with a few friends calling me "crazy" and "anti-Mac" for even just suggesting the notion. In 2005 Apple started shipping mice with multi-button functionality, and the sky didn't fall after all. Instead, there's just a little less RSI in the Mac world as people make fewer trips up to the menu bar.
Shortly after Apple premiered the infamous "hockey puck" mouse I predicted its demise too, but in all honesty that was an obvious one everyone saw coming.
So those are my qualifications as a soothsayer.
In all fairness, I've had a few misses too: back in the '90s with my 56k connection I predicted that video wouldn't be important on the Web. :) Win some, lose some.
With those qualifications in hand, I'll walk out to a slender limb with a prediction for the iPad.
Enough has been written about the iPad's pros and cons that there's little I could add to what's already been said across the web that I haven't written in the previous post.
Here I'll just jump in and report my hunch:
This is not the device they were hoping to deliver.
For whatever reasons, technical or otherwise, the iPad we saw yesterday is a compromised prototype of the touchscreen UI for something yet to come, a mere stepping stone toward a product that'll look very different by the time it's fully realized.
Steve Jobs is a serious thinker, and when he says he wants to define a whole new category of device, I believe him.
But in its current form, for all its beauty the iPad is functionally more of a large iPhone than a truly third category of device.
It weighs the same as a netbook, costs more than a netbook, and supports a far narrower range of computing tasks than a netbook. Some of Jobs' arguments against netbooks are valid, including to some degree his observation that "Netbooks aren't better than anything." So why not best them?
"But it's not designed for computing, it's a media viewer!" Well, that, but also an email client, and a iWorks interface, and osensibly a lot of other things that push the limits of its design into an area that suggests it wants to be a computer, but sacrifices a lot of computing functionality just as much as it looses screen real estate the moment you want to type.
Given the egonomic challenges of a virtual keyboard on a single-panel device, I might even go so far as to predict that the iPad we see next year or the year after will have a folding screen, giving us the benefits of a laptop while also delivering an optimal movie experience.
I wouldn't be surprised if the iPod-to-be also runs OS X in addition to iPhone OS, a capability that may find its way into a future release of OS X itself (OS XI?) for all of the computers Apple makes. Think Dashboard, but deeper.
My hunch is the iPad as we know it today will live about 24 months while Apple prepares something truly amazing. This was good, but the reviews thus far have been mixed, noting its limitations relative to the mind-blowing "Wow!" Apple normally delivers.
I believe that mind-blowing "Wow!" is on its way.
Crazy? Missing the point? Wouldn't be the first time. :)
We'll see....
Blog Home Filed under: iPad usability predictions
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Richard Gaskin
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