Apple’s 1987 Vision for the Future, It’s Here

An interesting read on Counternotions that I didn’t get to until today deals with why Apple doesn’t do concept products (as in ‘concept car’ or ‘Microsoft Surface’).

Most fascinating is the video that shows one of Apple’s rare (is it the only ever?) concept products: the ‘Knowledge Navigator’, a laptop-style device that connects to a proto-internet and scrapes and organizes data from various (’online’?) sources.

It’s interesting to see how most of these notions have by now been implemented, either by Apple itself or by various other hard and software providers.

Notebooks

Laptops, notebooks and subnotebooks – they’re everywhere these days. And they’re getting smaller, thinner and lighter. We now have the MacBook Air, the EEEPC and recently the new Dell Mini 9 – among many, may others.

Email, calendar, todo

We get all our productivity tools online these days, from web-based email to AIR apps or widgets for our todo lists. With GMail, Basecamp, Remember the Milk… we often don’t know what to do first – nevermind the social media networks.

Make sure to take in that upper right icon: does it stand for ‘multimedia’? If nothing else, our current computing environment is based on almost soley that.

Search

Well, does this need clarification? Although… intelligent search has seen some interesting advances, based on the concept of semantics, ranging from Cuil’s new magazine-style interface over Powerset’s new algorithm for searching Wikipedia, to the amazing Freebase Parallax.

Maps

Google maps is old news, Google Earth looks great, but it’s mashups that are talk of the town, such as Twittervision. But think of combining those… in your GPS.

Or how about mashing Surface with WorldWide Telescope, and Google Earth 3D with PhotoSynth… Maybe it would get you something like this:

It’s nothing less but handheld augmented reality but on your iPhone: excited yet?

Touch

This is an area in which concepts abound, but real products are still scarce. We’ve seen the Minority Report-style interfaces and Microsoft’s Surface, but those are not widely available, for now. Closest we’ve come today are the iPhone and the HTC. Obviously, rumours of a MacBook Touch abound…

Video and chat

Video is everywhere, as are video video chat, and online video streaming. Now micro blogging has been heading towards video as well – think Twitter meets YouTube – in services such as Seesmic, and it’s gone mobile with Qik.

Apple may not ‘do’ concepts, but if this was their vision of 2008, you’d certainly want them to do more of those.

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• Google and Apple to Rule the Universe? (Interesting Theory from Nick Carr)
• Apple’s leadership and vision will continue long into the future
• A waste of New York
• Steve Jobs returns to Apple part time

Tags: 1987, Apple, future, laptops, mobile, predictions, software