Elgan writes, “I’ve written in this space before about how Google is systematically nudging us to accept less privacy. Now I’m going to tell you how Apple is transforming you and me and softening our resistance to the gadget future they envision for us all.”
1. Virtual keyboards
2. Mobile cable box and DVR
3. Apps on demand
Elgan writes, “Five years from now, your PC will be an all-touch, no-keyboard giant tablet that replaces your cable box and DVR and facilitates the downloading and installation of software one small feature at a time. Apple is already working on the technology. And — don’t look now — but Apple is working on you, too.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “brulek” for the heads up.]
Agree. Steve’s no-keyboard iPhone was the start. Also consider the flatty-flat alum keyboards (I hate em) as exhibit #2.
Yeah, it’s all fun and games now, but when someone materializes inside a wall because you can’t make heads or tales out of where to put your hands on the control and you’re just waving and gesticulating wildly, we’ll see how you like this “keyboardless” future.
OMG I looked
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More like preparing for the past since all of CRAPPLE current technologies already exist years before they impliment on their devices and toys.
http://www.bing.com When it comes to decisions that matter, Bing & Decide
Since when was Computerworld revelant?
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@ I’m a PC
Zune Tang’s comments are satirical and welcomed on this board. We don’t need an imitator.
I for one welcome our new overlords!
Yeah, at least ZuneTang was clever. All I’m a PC has are these ancient, vague anti-apple droppings. Yawn.
Alright, uncloak. Quit trying to bolster your self by using bogus names. No one cares if ZT die or lives. No matter how many bogus names you use to act as though someone likes you. Sad, sad child.
Pop that zit and get on with it.
Five years from now will this guy still be writing about tech?
@I’m a PC. By the way its “implement” mate – your spelling is no better than your grammar. Did you mean “already existed”? And perhaps “are implemented”? If you are going to spout nonsense you might at least try to write it in English…
its should be it’s i think.
Mike Elgan has had some decent insights. But any pundit I’ve ever read misses on an essential point: the Law of Unintended Consequences. If Steve Jobs announces what we think he might next week, it could launch a revolution. There’s no telling whether Apple will win this round like they have with the iPod, and likely with the iPhone. But if Apple can get the public to embrace the idea of a tablet, it could bring about a fundamental shift from paper-based newspapers, magazines and other collateral to viewing and storing all this in electronic form on a portable tablet. We are doing this increasingly with our desktop Macs and PCs, MacBooks (and MacBook Pros), lesser laptops and netbooks, and our iPhones/iPod Touches. But what Apple may be planning is the end of printed material as we know it. That is a fundamental change.
If you work as a printer for a newspaper, you will curse that day. If you are a tree in Canada or the Brazilian Amazon, you will be thankful.
Okay, so that’s what we know. Or think we do. And that’s where punditry starts and stops. But what about the unintended consequences of a revolutionary and disruptive new invention? Often, something that is disruptive to the status quo the the catalyst for changes nobody saw coming. When Sir Tim Berners-Lee came up with the idea of applying hypertext to documents shared via the Internet with other research labs (what he called the World Wide Web), I doubt that he could envision the result and magnitude of what he created. Nor could any pundit. In 1994, did you imagine iTunes, Google, eBay or other big changes? I doubt it.
Nobody, not us, not journalists, analysts or pundits will really understand how revolutionary a tablet device might be until we look back five or ten years from now. I can’t say what might happen either. But I do believe that such a device could change our world in wonderful and sometimes scary ways that we can’t imagine. Only then will we realize, via the unintended consequences of a new invention, how pervasive and revolutionary this invention might be.
It’s “heads or tails”, as in flipping a coin.
MDN word: english. I kid you not.
To Anita Ficks: you are quite correct. The inventor of the printing press had no idea that he also spurred on the Renaissance to full flower, helped create and widen the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, news papers, helped bring about democracy, and was a key factor in the establishment of the constitution for the United States of America and eventually pushed the invention of typewriters and then computers…and so on. One little invention; world wide change for centuries.
The tablet computer is an evolution of Mr. Johannes Gutenberg’s press in 1440 to now, with lots of unintended consequences and impact.
@Radius – “All I’m a PC has are these ancient, vague anti-apple droppings. Yawn.”
They are not droppings. They’re pieces that flak off.
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Please be assimilated.
Well said. Reading Anita Ficks’ excellent comments, I thought of Guttenberg too. We might overlook inventions such as the plowshare, which gave man a way to cultivate fields with dramatically greater efficiency. Suddenly, humanity could do more than barely feed itself, and with the invention of the plowshare, man had time for other pursuits. An explosion of invention soon followed.
As you so eloquently stated about Guttenberg’s invention of movable type, suddenly, literature could be mass reproduced, bringing about an explosion of knowledge, which in turn brought about the sharing of ideas and a burst of invention that continues to this day.
Will a possible tablet device wean us from printed books, newspapers and magazines to something greater? Will having portable knowledge and communication not just save trees and cut down global warming (2/3 of all carbon released into the atmosphere comes from the clearing of equatorial rainforests for farmland and other uses), but do things we can barely imagine today? This is what the media, analysts and pundits fail to comprehend. To them, the earth is flat. To Steve Jobs, the world is much different.
Good insight, my friend.
Once Elgan wrote “giant tablet” I knew he knows absolutely nothing. Steve doesn’t do “giant,” Ballmer does.
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Steve doesn’t do “giant,” Ballmer does.
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@silverhawk
Exactly.
Hey, he’s right.
We talked aobut these things 30 YEARS AGO!
Elgan: “The big problem is convincing us to use them.”
Not we of the cognoscente! In fact, I’d say a lot of us drive Apple, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the future as well. We’re called FUTURISTS. We know where we need to go.
Now if someone would just rid us all of Microsoft…
Just to have an idea what he really means, check out this presentation….. Personally I think it’s very very good…, highly recommended…
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tv/TED-India-Pranav-Mistry/videoshow_ted/5231080.cms
Now if someone would just rid us all of Microsoft…
They seem to be doing a pretty good job of doing that themselves thankfully.
Hmmmm, Just a thought here. But why does everyone that talks about a touch screen keyboard seem to forget the Apple wireless keyboard. I use two of them and love em.
Just a thought,
en