Apple ~ Where It Is All Going

Everyone and his three uncles are talking this weekend about the new, soon-to-be-released Macbooks. But I want to ask some more basic questions about Apple and its future.

Apple most definitely has a long-term game plan that likely goes far beyond Steve Jobs’ tenure at the helm, If you were Steve and could lay out a road map like that for the most innovative and successful corporation in the world, wouldn’t you do that too?

To be sure, that roadmap has a lot of convergence in it. Think about it. It won’t be long before the laptop has both the power and speed of any desktop, and there might only be one kind of Macintosh in your future. If so, it will definitely be a laptop and not a desktop computer. This is not to say that there will not be many variations on that theme, in both configurations, features and colors. Apple is very good to make sure about those, right?

Frankly, I suspect that Apple will be hard pressed to keep more Mac features out of the iPhones and the iPods of the future, and will have to hobble them in some significant way in order to keep them from stealing sales from their Macintosh computers.

But size will no longer matter in the future of computing, let alone in Apple’s future. Long gone will be hard drives and media drives, replaced by solid state memory chips and blazing fast wireless routers. It is not inconceivable that the ultimate Mac will not even be a laptop at all, but will resemble your current iPhone or iPod Touch. (Unless of course they figure out how to put it all on a chip that is powered by your body heat and directed by your thoughts – then they will just inject it under your skin, or sell it to you in a pill.)

But in the near future, either Apple will be selling small devices to hook to every monitor, media device, and printer in your house, or they (and others) will be selling you those products already configured for effortless and fast wireless connection to your Mac and your iPod/iPhone.

In this not-so-far-off future, your ultimate trusty Mac will be small enough to fit in your pocket, but will sport a monitor that is much bigger than on the laptop of today. In fact, your future clothes may come with ways to power your computing devices and to help you make use of their myriad features.

In the future you’ll be sitting in any room in your house and your trusty Mac will display your desktop on any handy flat screen available for you. And you will be beat-boxing your verbiage too, with voice texting, voice commands, in-the-air gestures, or keyboarding on your ultimate Mac, as you please.

But to be sure, Life is not only about the destination. It is also about the Journey. So enjoy all the iterations of Macs that are coming your way today. Don’t hold off and wait until your perfect Mac comes along. If you do, you will miss the new MacBook Pros, the Mac Pros with their fantastic Cinema Displays, and all the delicious iPods that are out there right now.

But what of the immediate future for Apple, say, this Fall or next January?

Is it time for Apple to release to us new MacBooks, and/or MacBook Pros?

Will they have new, thin aluminum frames? Will those frames come in iPod colors?

Will they feature the new flat keyboards, like the newest full-sized keyboards Apple just released for their iMacs and Mac Pros?

Will their monitors be scary-thin?

Will they finally feature solid state memory chips for near instantaneous boots? Or will they offer new solid state drives to replace power hungry hard drives?

Will Apple finally get rid of the SuperDrives from their laptops? I mean, with a cable modem, wireless downloads of software, music and movies are really fast today. Who even uses their Superdrives anymore, unless it is on an older Mac? It just makes sense that the least used and most power-hungry device should be deleted from the laptop. Don’t you agree?

I will play Dvorak here and ask, will they even be called “Macs” anymore or will Apple call them something new? Just how far will this convergence go between the new Leopard and the iPhone and iPod Touch interface? And how far is Apple going to move away from traditional computers to push other devices.

Yeah, the future is not what it used to be. We don’t have jet packs and flying cars, and we are not living on the moon, but then we have the most wonderful and beautiful computers and media devices that anyone could ever imagine, don’t we?

The future is always rushing toward us, but with Apple, it might be here much quicker than we think.

Regards,
Roger Born
“Sorry, no refunds.”

.