As reader Joseph said, I kind of asked for this one, didn’t I?
The new iTunes 10 icon is nice. It fits with the rest of the circular, glowing orbs that Apple trots out these days. It’s simple and clean, and has the old-school Aqua look to it.
And as Steve said during the keynote, the CD era is about to be eclipsed by everything digital. With version 10, now is the time for a change.
The Newton was, for those who can remember back that far, revolutionary. It was a huge deal. The company had some serious problems with it (marketing being one of the big ones), but the devices (and the Newton OS that powered them) were many years ahead of their time. Case in point: it still holds up strangely well against a current iPhone (Newton’s had multi-tasking, etc. way back in the old days). And, of course, there was the eMate 300 (which was a Newton-powered laptop that featured a rechargeable battery that, I kid you not, lasted through 28 hours of continuous usage).
This after rebutting whether Apple would’ve done fine without Steve Jobs’ return in 1997.
Lunduke probably assumes that the Newton platform could have, somehow, become profitable for Apple somewhere down the road. It’s an interesting thought experiment, but one fraught with unknowns.
If Steve Jobs hadn’t returned, would Apple still have avoided a buyout/bankruptcy/total meltdown? Would we be using bMates and cMates?
Here we see a great switcher message, and a kick-off to the “digital hub” strategy Steve Jobs laid out at Macworld the year before.
[Via David Kendal's tip.]
“Most of the people who developed these PDAs developed them because they thought individuals were going to buy them and give them to their families. My friends started General Magic [a new company that hopes to challenge the Newton]. They think your kids are going to have these, your grandmother’s going to have one, and you’re going to all send messages. Well, at $1,500 a pop with a cellular modem in them, I don’t think too many people are going to buy three or four for their family. The people who are going to buy them in the first five years are mobile professionals.”
- Steve Jobs in a great Rolling Stone interview from 1994. Lots of quotable Steve in there.
Apple finally introduced the iPad tablet computer last Wednesday, confirming rumors that have been circulating since before I started Newton Poetry a few years ago. From then to now, I’ve read article after article and rumor after rumor – everything from claiming this new device was the second coming of the Newton to a giant iPod Touch.
Sometimes keeping track of everything was exhausting. Even more than the iPhone, the mythical Apple tablet kept rumor sites in business for years. Then, when so many confirmations gelled together, most Apple fans knew what was coming when Steve Jobs hit the stage on January 27 in San Francisco.
Many, many tech writers invested in a lot of detective work to flesh out this device, and I think a lot of credit goes to them for softening the holy-crap blow that this device would’ve otherwise caused us to have. The iPad’s introduction was nothing like the iPhone introduction because we had all seen and heard it before. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Nothing remarkable, nothing earth-shattering – just steady progress, and tiny chips brushed away from the mobile sculture Apple is crafting.
This project, the giant move to mobile computing Apple has been working on since the day of the original PowerBook and Newton MessagePad, has essentially come to fruition in the form of the iPad. Jobs mentioned (and reports back him up) that Apple is primarily a mobile device company. It’s the powerful combination of a touch-based interface, a world-conquering application platform, and – most of all – the opportunity that is still to come.
That’s the key. I think the earth-shattering part will come in the form of something we haven’t even seen yet. We might even have trouble knowing it when we see it.
For some, the iPad doesn’t seem like much now. But just wait, says Steven Fry in a much-linked post:
In the future, when [the iPad] has two cameras for fully featured video conferencing, GPS and who knows what else built in (1080 HD TV reception and recording and nano projection, for example) and when the iBook store has recorded its 100 millionth download and the thousands of accessories and peripherals that have invented uses for iPad that we simply can’t now imagine – when that has happened it will all have seemed so natural and inevitable that today’s nay-sayers and sceptics will have forgotten that they ever doubted its potential.
All ready, I’m seeing fantastic ideas about what the iPad can become, given some time.
The iPad, like the original Macintosh, ships with basic task-oriented software titles, like iWork, that make it a capable machine. With the Mac, the explosion in innovation came when desktop publishers realized what a powerful machine they had sitting on their desks. With the iPad, a similar spark will happen.
The tech echo chamber is resounding this notion that the computer-as-appliance has finally arrived. The iPad is the computer your grandma can use without calling you for tech support every week. The details have been abstracted away – and use whatever car metaphor makes you comfortable here.
And that’s probably true. But something tells me the future is brighter than grandma. The iPad will gain mutant electro-superpowers after the proverbial lightning strikes.
Storms a-brewin’.
From Ken Fager on his Flickr account, drawn with an MP2100.
Steve Jobs descended to the base of Mt. Yerba Buena and unveiled the tablet to the gathered unwashed masses…
Today’s the big day, eh?
[Via @kenfagerdotcom.]
“If Apple had sold even close to 30 million Newton OS devices in its first 18 months, Apple would not have been ‘beleaguered’, they would not have bought NeXT, and Steve Jobs never would have been brought back. Instead, IDG reported that Apple sold a grand total of only 60,000 Newton units in all of 1996, the Newton’s third year on the market. That’s about how many iPhone OS devices Apple sold per day — per day! — for the first 18 months after the iPhone went on sale.”
- John Gruber at Daring Fireball, on Apple’s too-intent focus on the Next Big Thing during the 1990s.
Steve Jobs and crew have some great ideas, but not all Apple innovations have come under his watch.
That’s the basis behind Mac|Life’s “Top 10 Innovative Apple Products – That Steve DIDN’T Dream Up” post.
Two items on that list are familiar: the Newton platform, and the eMate 300. Dreamed up by Apple’s Steve Sakoman, Steve Capps, and Larry Tesler (with help from then-CEO John Sculley), the Newton MessagePad and eMate were creations Steve Jobs had nothing to do with.
Mac|Life wonders: “And if Jobs hadn’t come along and killed it, who knows what might have been?”
[Image courtesy of State of the Ark.]
