Would Powerbox let you punch through the sandbox?
Powerbox is the most buggy part…
Ahhhhh
You should put an Easter egg in as a tribute to it.
A hidden splash screen with a cat using a sandbox as a litter box with the codename POWAHBOX!
(Like Photoshops Bleching cat egg in Version 4)
lol
I stumbled across this article…
arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/ … ishing.ars
Maybe the next big thing is…
textbooks…
Wait. You have to sandbox your app, no matter how incomplete, to pass a validation process that would fail due to the incomplete nature of your app? So what does the app store do for you again? Other than skim off the top of your earnings?
Sorry. Not having a good “I love apple” month.
And did anyone point you at the three word entry yet? 
I’m proud of that.
I have those already?
A – Apple TV rev one. Took some work. but it’s there.
B – 2012 Ford focus with sync and MyFordTouch. Plays my phone, ipod, nav and i don’t even have to touch it. If I don’t want to.
C – A+ Seagate Go Flex Home. Yes I did a tad of work but Siri controls it just fine. I’m up to 4 TB of data. All at my fingertips.
As you said it isn’t really new, but Steve made it in the context of sex appeal and sellable. I don’t see that trend continuing in the future.
A direct quote from the three word story Time For Another…
To return, briefly, to topic: Steve J. established Apple University in order to ensure the “DNA” of Apple remained ingrained in the culture. It seems he invested a lot of energy in his last few years to prepare Apple for ongoing success without him. No way of knowing how successful it will be until after a few years, but given his hit rate with other projects and the quality of the people he brought on board, I think the chances are good that AU will have a positive effect. Given also that Apple has an talented, established and stable executive team (including Cook, Ive, Schiller, Mansfield and Forstall) that have been part of all the major decisions in recent years, then I don’t think there is any need for doubt about Apple’s immediate and mid-term future.
The problem you have is simply you like the current products sooo much that you have summit fever. You imagine the only way from here is down and get depressed. I actually see the same problem when we give graduates 5/5 gradings in their year end reviews. (70% of the population gets a 3 grade do a 5 is a big deal)
I’ll give you the same advise I give them: “shut up whining and get back to work”
No, hang on. That’s not it…
My advice, for what it’s worth: don’t hold your breath. Capitalism makes no promises; with management, in particular, history is not a particularly good guide to the future, especially when a strong leader goes. (Soccer in the UK illustrates that well enough.) Things come together for a glorious serendipitous moment, and then they fall apart.
Percy wrote more or less the last word on the subject.
PF – I do not have summit fever. I dislike most of the products apple offers. I am just to lazy to convert (meaning I like crap that works, not crap that I have to keep working). You could reduce the Apple lineup to 3 useful hardware products
- MBP 15 (dedicated graphics card in the 13 would eliminate the 15).
- iPhone 4s and ONLY because of Siri.
- iPod nano.
In my opinion everything else is a waste.
The Apple software lineup is very unappealing to me. Other than OSX (which to me is just commercially supported BSD) I only buy the apple products that I have to to keep M$ off the system (yet be simple enough for everyone in the fam to use). The only apps I have paid for are Scriv, Sparrow (in a few minutes), Moneywell, DVDPedia.
So what am I whining about? It is this; in most cases of “personality cults” (which is pretty much the only way to describe apple) once the personality dies, what do you have left? I like to think that Stevie made plans but given what we know, is it really possible?
Dear god, I am a fan boy!
I must now go dispose of myself.
Oh come now, the Twentieth Anniversary Mac doesn’t make your list as essential?
But more seriously I feel Apple is post-peak (plateau, really) anyway by about five years, for what I want of it: easy to maintain UNIX computers. And that has more to do with the presence of Steve Jobs, than the lack of Steve Jobs.
I would agree that the ONLY thing that has me on Mac is OSX (cheaper to buy mac than linux support which is funny since I do linux support for a living). One thing that did get me as a huge innovation was the integration of the newton with a phone and a music player (for those not following at home that is the iPhone). I think that will be the defining moment of the 21st century. The 4s (and exclusively Siri) shows the real ideal of ubiquitous computing that is intuitive.
It will take a lot to show apple will not go the way of a former pioneer; Eastman Kodak.
Yup, Siri is the start of the Star Trek dream, and for that sort of thing it is all uphill from here I do believe. I myself have been slow on picking up the iPhone fever, mainly because I’ve never had much use for a phone, though I do realise the device is much more than just a telephony mechanism, and that one can get much use out of even if they never once use the “phone” part of it.
But for all of that stuff, I’m content to wait until something appeals to me, and I really don’t care who does it. I must say the Android based devices to appeal to me a bit more on most scores. The nature of having more control over the device than what The Company dictates (jailbreaking aside), is a big part of it, but I have yet to see something that encapsulates everything I’d like from a super-Newton. It’s getting close, though. I think a few pieces of key hardware are missing. I’m waiting for my foldable real-time eInk display, I guess. Something I can just as easily draw on and stuff in my pocket. Something that costs $10 dollars so I don’t care of it gets lost. Something that doesn’t have a two year lifespan with a volatile LI battery. I’m afraid Apple won’t ever deliver anything like that.
Really? Since we’re only 12 years in, I somehow doubt it…
Eastman Kodak did file for bankruptcy, it’s true. But it took them 131 years to do it. All Apple shareholders should welcome that kind of “failure.”
Katherine
Nor will anyone else, IMO. This is my field, so please excuse my rambling…
The big challenge with foldable displays is making them impermeable to air and water – which is bad for the electronics – while still keeping them flexible. Flexible encapsulation is expensive, and doesn’t work that well at any price at this time. Samsung claims to have a flexible OLED coming out soon, and lots of people have demonstrated flexible prototypes, but prototypes don’t have to survive real world use for several years.
Relative to that challenge, a display that you can draw on is relatively simple. Using an ordinary pen to do it is hard, though, as is being able to recognize any arbitrary handwriting.
Doing all of this for $10 is very very hard. Even if the electronics were free – which they almost are – even the raw materials cost for the rest is likely to push you above this aggressive a price point.
Not many alternatives to the LI battery that aren’t just as bad. Laptop-scale fuel cells have been demonstrated, but that certainly won’t help the cost: you’d need more than $10 worth of rare metals alone. Solar is a possibility, energy harvesting (from vibrations and such) is a possibility, but for a pocket sized device neither is likely to provide more than auxiliary power.
Katherine
Rambling is always appreciated. Yeah, I understand I’m not really talking about today, or even ten years from now. Recognising handwriting isn’t a big thing for me, as I prefer to write in shorthand anyway (and I doubt anyone is going to be labouring over a system that decodes that). A dedicated stylus is fine. Being a visual thinker, I like being able to draw diagrams in freehand and annotate them. My dream system would let me zoom in and out on the diagram freely, so that I could design a diagram with precision and zoom out for a bigger picture. There are some applications on the iPad that do approach this with vector mapping and gestural zooming, but unfortunately finger based drawing isn’t ideal, and I’ve yet to find a capacitance based stylus that I like. A puffball of foam is only barely better than my pinkie.
The price point, in my mind, would follow the Amazon model of taking a larger loss on the hardware and making cash on the services. The Fire is, as an electronic device, worth quite a bit more than $200, I’m sure. They make up for it on how easy to is to buy services and products from them. The cheapness of the hardware has been chiefly what holds me back in adopting anything as yet. I just don’t feel comfortable walking around with hundreds of dollars worth of gear. It’s not that I can’t replace the gear, it’s that I don’t fancy getting mugged for it. If I’m not comfortable hauling it out at midnight on a city street than it’s not working as a thought capturing device for me.
I probably wouldn’t have as much of a beef with LI if so many devices didn’t have the batteries soldered into the boards and basically sealed into a sexy case. Replaceable batteries seems to me essential, but the market is evidently more interested in devices that do not appear to have any openings in them.
Who can say what the defining point of the 21st century will be, but efficient neural to automation bridging would certainly be up there.
Let’s just hope it’s not another war …
M.
Wars have always and will always happen.
Siri is old hat. You can talk to her on SYSTEM 7 and SYSTEM 8 on old macs and has been on OSX since Apple bought it. She is just now mainstream and on a smaller device (Newton 2)
Kodak went bankrupt because of poor business decisions not because of lack of new products.
What was killing apple before was the 5000 product lineups without any consistency or common sense. The fact that Apple has trimmed that down to just a few products that allow some customization allows for an easier time picking a product.
Technology is moving through what I call the “snowball effect” and is accelerating exponentially. SO young are we in the 21st century and we are already looking for the “defining point”? IN the 20th century was the defining point found in 1912? Nope in 1912 we couldn’t even fly yet less than 50 years later mankind was in space. Imagine what things will be like 50 years from now.
I think Apple will be around for awhile. I do think they will be more recognized as a “device” company rather than a computer company down the road. I think they will be more into making digital user “devices” rather than just computers.
But hey not too long ago everyone swore that Apple was done for, they would never increase their market share, no one would buy an apple product, no real computer user or tech savvy person would even dream of owning anything from apple, etc…
In less than 20 years Apple went from being the red head step child to the big kid on the block, some of the tech giants are failing, some new ones are huge.
Tech moves fast. If a company can keep up and innovate they can stay alive. Apple has been very good at innovation…
What was the primary image of “computers” thirty years ago? Bulky complicated tangles of technological gee-whizzery, mostly serving group projects and interests.
Today, the image of “computers” is exactly what you describe: digital user devices. Ignore what’s really going on under the hood (which most of us do): how much traditional “computing” is happening? Not as much as the writing and researching and image manipulating and communicating and general goofing off.
ps