The future of the future (Stay Gold) (*)
(This post is a follow up to a discussion I had saturday evening with Oli)
What now...
Saw a whole lot of posts about the new iMac. It reminded me of this Wired article advocating why Sony should buy Apple.
Good ideas, good design, bad marketing for Apple
vs.
good marketing for Sony
Whilst both have got good products.
And it all came clear to me.
The new iMac was morphing Apple in the next Sony.
The apple guys were transforming 'emselves from leader to follower.
What's the fuss about blending a laptop with an LCD-TV ?
A taiwanese did it maybe 3 or 4 years ago (I think it was ASUS, correct me if I'm wrong). Gateway and Dell tried to sell it 2 years ago.
BTW, here's a photo of an iMac at one of my favorite 7-to-1 bar :
low tech black internet access point, G5-iMac style
Really, I'm not convinced this iMac is the next big thing. Okay, the product-design is good, they captured the iPod essence in a 20 inches display, it's got a cohesive brand road map melting iPod, iCube and the previous desktop lamp-style iMac.
But what's the new shift in product feature or usability in this new iMac ?
What if...
What if ... I could use take my PC everywhere in my pocket ? Newton --> Palm --> Pocket PC
What if ... this PC had no cables ? AirPort --> 802.11 --> Centrino
What if ... this PC had the processing power of a Cray ? G3 --> G4 --> Pentium III --> XScale
What if ... I could plug it to any LCD projector and run PowerPoint to show my magic-quadrant slides ? hum... hahem...
ok. no Apple there. But good smart (and sometimes afordable)
softwares and hardware
Still, I'd want to watch my powerpoints on the way to the appointment to be sure I've got the right punch line. Therefore I'd need a good screen on my PDA. Too bad it's so small.
Wait...
What if I was able to use the airplane's tv screen or a taxi backseat screen to plug my PDA/phone/subnotebook ? Moreoever, I don't have to plug it, since I've now got 802.11 thanks to Apple's AirPort or since I can use bluetooth.
Ah... hum... noway. 802.11(a|b|...|g|...X) and bluetooth are on the network layer. And I don't want to connect to a screen using TCP/IP. What's the point using TCP/IP since my screen is not packet oriented and doesn't send that much data back.
You could argue that putting a little computing power in the screen would allow an applicative layer protocol like X11 (or Adobe PostScript, embedded in NextStep. oops Apple again ;-) to interact with the PDA.
But this would cause the screen to be too expensive with all the specific CPU needed. And defacto standard would be come along a very long and weavy path.
Plus, putting so much computing power in a flat screen wouldn't make it very easy in 10 years to migrate to e-ink.
I've briefly exposed what could be done on the output device side. But think of what could be done from an input device perspective :
What if I could interact with a drill-down view of my Quattro magic-N-cube using a Sony Eye-Toy v11 connected to my SonyApple Newton via bluetooth and display everything on the e-paperboard of the Hilton's conference room ?
That would make a lot of e-shit available for e-scribblling on the e-paperboard ;-)
(*) Everything but the girl
