A reborn PDA makes no sense. This is either iPhone 3.0 with handwriting recognition and third party developer access or a much larger iTablet (laptop replacement) with Mac OS X inside.
I have mentioned a product along these lines several times before (as has Ireland).
It makes perfect sense and you can see the pieces coming together, in a HUGE way. The problem is marketing the device. What is it? A Macbook, A Mac Mini Replacement or a bigger iPod/iPhone?
All I know (and I've mentioned this before) is Leopard is slapping us round the face with the clues!!!
Why does the 3D Dock exist? (Because it wants to be touched?)
Coverflow in Finder
Core Animation
Quicklook Documents with a Single Touch
Give me a break!!!!!! It's everywhere. This is the biggest stealth project in History!!
This could be the first Mac to dock in every area of your life.
If it's not pocketable, it's not going to be worth carrying around in addition to a notebook computer (one of the arguments against the Foleo.) The great thing about the iPhone and Touch is that it already has the hardware to match or exceed PDA's, but I can see why Apple will always limit some functionality to preserve the user experience of those devices.
There's no confirmation that such a beast will ever be released, but if an Apple product were able to successfully replace a paper-based Compact planner (Franklin-Covey) at a reasonable price, it could be a huge hit. The problem with trying to replace a paper planner is price and durability. Paper is very hard to beat in those areas, and I predict that won't happen until very high resolution, low-power e-ink displays are common... maybe 6 to 10 years off.
TI agree that third-party development changes everything. It then becomes basically an OS X tablet. Of course the danger then is that it will cannibalize Mac sales
EVERYTHING eventually gets cannibalized. The successful company just controls the cannibalization.
Have MacBooks cannibalized (i.e. destroyed the market for) desktops? Not yet, but if that eventually happens, then its better to be in the position of having done it yourself than having someone else do it to you.
A few weeks ago, I was contemplating why Apple was pushing the resolution independence feature so heavily to developers. This is a new feature to developers in Leopard, yet it's not a major concern today. Sure, the MacBooks have resolutions up to 100dpi, but that's not a huge difference from the standard 72dpi. But, if you look at the iPhone and the new iPod nano, those handheld devices have extremely high resolutions (around 300dpi).
Put 2 and 2 together and you see that Apple must be planning to let developers create apps for some kind of handheld device, which will have a very high-rez display.
And my own personal prediction was exactly what they indicated here. Apple's different take on a sub-notebook, with multi-touch display.
Except... multi-touch is a more limited interface. You can't have apps work the same way they do when using a mouse/trackpad. For example, on an iPhone, you can't do drag-and-drop, since that is how the user "scrolls" around on a webpage. So how will Apple solve this problem?? I don't know, but I trust them to find a good solution. And I can't wait to have my apps running on a more portable device!
I wonder if this will play music/video like the touch. It does'nt seem that this would cut into those sales of the Touch, even if it did, because of the size. i think it will have wi-fi an BT. what else?
I think most modern PDAs do that kind of stuff so it would be silly for anything new not to. As far as I am concerned the iPod Touch is just a PDA with an iPod name.
Will SOMEone work on that, please? It's hindering our technological advancement.
-Clive
It's bad enough putting up with boors yakking on their cell phones in public places, now we'll have to suffer geeks talking dirty to their mobile macs on top of that?
A few weeks ago, I was contemplating why Apple was pushing the resolution independence feature so heavily to developers. This is a new feature to developers in Leopard, yet it's not a major concern today. Sure, the MacBooks have resolutions up to 100dpi, but that's not a huge difference from the standard 72dpi. But, if you look at the iPhone and the new iPod nano, those handheld devices have extremely high resolutions (around 300dpi).
The iPhone and iPod touch have 163 PPI screens.
In order to come up with the size, for the mockup, I assumed the following:
1) This new handheld would leverage the same multi-touch interface as the iPhone/iPod touch.
2) In order to keep continuity of the interface, the screen would likely be the same PPI.
As such, the new 'Newton' would have a 5.5" screen to achieve a 720x480 resolution.
I agree with the peeps that say this doesn't make any sense as a PDA. Apple would want to grow the iPhone and the next logical step for that would be true PDA functionality, or at the very least better PIM features.
My guess is that this will lead to (not be) the tablet Mac. Size wise I'm thinking 6 to 8 inch wide-screen display, with multi-touch. O/S would be full blown OS X, limited by chipset features. It would have Wi-Fi and BlueTooth as well as USB 2.0 (or 3.0) ports for external devices and a video-out connector with support for various dongles like the current notebooks have. Video would be integrated Intel. As far as handwriting recognition goes, that would depend on the release of the unit. If it's released next year, than no handwriting recognition, but if we're talking '09, multi-touch v2 should be ready for the public, and it would become a more likely feature. The current multi-touch technology works well in a small size unit, so a lot of testing would need to be done to see if it would scale well to a larger display, as well as getting down the cost to manufacture it and sell it at a reasonable price. It wouldn't have cellular capabilities as that would require too much power for the size device. It would be flash based with no hard drive, probably in the 30 GB range.
this is starting to look a few years down the road. but it will happen! by 2012 we'll have 2TB of data in our iPod Touch 4.0s
Excuse me? Did you say 2012? 2TB?!?!
Today's iPos touch has a max of 16GB. HD capacity roughly follows Moore's Law and doubles every 24 months (not to be confused with overall performance, which doubles every 18 months). It's almost 2008, so that leaves two full cycles of Moore's Law units 2012... putting us at 64GB... 128GB at the very best. We can expect 2TB flash by 2020, maybe.
However, once we master nanotechnology, we may start falling into the "technological singularity," where devices start designing their successors... but I doubt that'll happen before 2020.
In one corner, we have iPhone and iPod Touch with OS X, but with limited functionality due to limited processor and touch display, which is due to limited pocketable size.
In the other corner, we have Mac laptops with Leopard, which requires a "hefty" processor and keyboard/mouse to drive its functionality. ("hefty" only in relation to the ARM-based embedded processors.)
What types of touch-screen devices make sense in-between these two? Coming from the iPhone corner, if a device is no longer pocketable so that there could be a larger (5-9")display, but still light (9 to 14 ounces) and thin, what would we want to use it for beyond that available in iPhone/iPod Touch? Web surfing would be easier. Data input would be easier. Document viewing and editing would be easier. Movie-watching would be nicer. But what else would make a large market want this instead of iPod touch?
Coming from the Mac corner, how much can we take away from a Mac laptop and still call it a "Mac"? How much Mac capability are we willing to trade-off to get a lighter and thinner Mac? Does a Mac by definition need to run Leopard? If so, then it needs a well-powered Intel chip, which drives battery. Note that Jobs poo-pooed touch interfaces for the Mac, so then a Mac needs a keyboard/pad (speech input is still not here!). Does it need more than 64GB storage? That would require a HDD if it was released within a year which would drive battery.
Was the Newton a PDA? I think it was more than that, and in some ways, less than that.
It was ahead of its time, but the times are now way ahead of it.
This device will not be a re-invented Newton, nor will it be a PDA, nor will it be a UMPC.
It will fit exactly where millions of people want it to fit, or it won't be manufactured.
My bet is that it WILL be manufactured, and it will again change the way we work.
It will not be a small laptop. It will not be a PDA. It will not be a re-incarnation of the Newton.
It will be an "Apple-way-of-doing-things" device.
The iPhone is revolutionary as a phone. The Mac OS is clearly the best interface for a keyboard-based PC/laptop right now.
Again, think outside the box!
Put elements of the Newton, the iPod, the iPhone, the Mac, and add Apples flare for wonderful usability, size it right with the proper connections to the outside world, and you have the new device that is being talked about.
Think outside the box! Do we not know Apple well enough that they can come out with game-changing devices? If not, we should by now.
Don't think Personal Digital Assistant, think Personal Digital Life Manager... Imagine it cohesively linking your Mac, your AppleTV, your Home Theater, your Home Automation, etc. etc.
I'm putting a 50/50 guess that we will see this device by mid-year next year.
The poster from Michigan/Brisbane was onto something....
This thing would have to be good for train commuters, etc, and really has to have broadband. It could have both GSM and CDMA radios in it and you could use your existing company. Even if they did an exclusive with verizon, this ?? doesn't violate the ATT agreement because the thing wouldn't have a microphone... ie it's not a phone. It's a new type of device. It's an always available window into the web.
They may be trying to expand their content relationships to publishing, and do an apple print store. Read your newspapers at starbucks?
Something like this could be a hit at home also as a remote, picture frame, recipe source (imagine buying recipes for 99 cents and standing that puppy up in your kitchen).
As a market expands, more segments appear. Mobile demand will likely demand an intermediate device like this. (After all, first it was just the model T....)
Collaboration with Google when they win the 700MHz auction?
Seriously - the iPhone presently fails as a business-useful PDA. There is a need and there are many uses for a portable information storage device that's less clumsy to use in a car or plane than a notebook. The iPhone could grow into having these capabilities but Apple seems to want to control the ecosystem and focus on its Phone/Email/iPod uses.
What's needed is the ability to run apps such as FileMaker. Explain to me why Palm & Windows CE devices have FileMaker Mobile and the iPhone does not. I'd also like the ability to store and display Word docs, PDF's and Excel files on a pocket device and have the ability to call them up with a few taps via a file browser and view them on a readable display. You need to be able to have a standard page width of text readable on the display without the need to zoom. The larger touch display also would allow a more usable on-screen keyboard.
Put the Mac OS on a pocket device with WiFi & Bluetooth and fully open it up to developers to port applications to - and Apple will really have something. When out of WiFi range let it connect using Bluetooth through the iPhone to the web. Lots of possibilities...
Since Apple has demonstrated what's possible with the MacOS on a portable device with the iPhone nothing would surprise me. I expect in a few years we'll be carrying the capability todays notebooks in our pockets.
There's already an online program that does this. I saw the demo several weeks ago, but I didn't bookmark it. You can enter natural language which is interpreted into calendar instructions for meetings, appointments, etc. The demo is cool, but frankly it saves only seconds.
ah yeah, use it all the time.
Folks in the inner loop refer to it as GOOGLE CALENDAR.
Was the Newton a PDA? I think it was more than that, and in some ways, less than that.
It was ahead of its time, but the times are now way ahead of it.
This device will not be a re-invented Newton, nor will it be a PDA, nor will it be a UMPC.
It will fit exactly where millions of people want it to fit, or it won't be manufactured.
My bet is that it WILL be manufactured, and it will again change the way we work.
It will not be a small laptop. It will not be a PDA. It will not be a re-incarnation of the Newton.
It will be an "Apple-way-of-doing-things" device.
The iPhone is revolutionary as a phone. The Mac OS is clearly the best interface for a keyboard-based PC/laptop right now.
Again, think outside the box!
Put elements of the Newton, the iPod, the iPhone, the Mac, and add Apples flare for wonderful usability, size it right with the proper connections to the outside world, and you have the new device that is being talked about.
Think outside the box! Do we not know Apple well enough that they can come out with game-changing devices? If not, we should by now.
Don't think Personal Digital Assistant, think Personal Digital Life Manager... Imagine it cohesively linking your Mac, your AppleTV, your Home Theater, your Home Automation, etc. etc.
I'm putting a 50/50 guess that we will see this device by mid-year next year.
IMHO.
You just typed a whole lot of 'what it's not'.
What do you think it is? What is a "personal digital life manager"?
Comments
we'll have to wait and see.
Really?
The PDA is dead as a standalone device.
surf
station
(let's call it what it is, people) Touch Tablets.
As the running joke in 'Shakespeare in Love' went, 'Good name!'.
It makes perfect sense and you can see the pieces coming together, in a HUGE way. The problem is marketing the device. What is it? A Macbook, A Mac Mini Replacement or a bigger iPod/iPhone?
All I know (and I've mentioned this before) is Leopard is slapping us round the face with the clues!!!
Why does the 3D Dock exist? (Because it wants to be touched?)
Coverflow in Finder
Core Animation
Quicklook Documents with a Single Touch
Give me a break!!!!!! It's everywhere. This is the biggest stealth project in History!!
This could be the first Mac to dock in every area of your life.
The Home, The Car, The Office and The Pocket!!
If it's not pocketable, it's not going to be worth carrying around in addition to a notebook computer (one of the arguments against the Foleo.) The great thing about the iPhone and Touch is that it already has the hardware to match or exceed PDA's, but I can see why Apple will always limit some functionality to preserve the user experience of those devices.
There's no confirmation that such a beast will ever be released, but if an Apple product were able to successfully replace a paper-based Compact planner (Franklin-Covey) at a reasonable price, it could be a huge hit. The problem with trying to replace a paper planner is price and durability. Paper is very hard to beat in those areas, and I predict that won't happen until very high resolution, low-power e-ink displays are common... maybe 6 to 10 years off.
TI agree that third-party development changes everything. It then becomes basically an OS X tablet. Of course the danger then is that it will cannibalize Mac sales
EVERYTHING eventually gets cannibalized. The successful company just controls the cannibalization.
Have MacBooks cannibalized (i.e. destroyed the market for) desktops? Not yet, but if that eventually happens, then its better to be in the position of having done it yourself than having someone else do it to you.
Put 2 and 2 together and you see that Apple must be planning to let developers create apps for some kind of handheld device, which will have a very high-rez display.
And my own personal prediction was exactly what they indicated here. Apple's different take on a sub-notebook, with multi-touch display.
Except... multi-touch is a more limited interface. You can't have apps work the same way they do when using a mouse/trackpad. For example, on an iPhone, you can't do drag-and-drop, since that is how the user "scrolls" around on a webpage. So how will Apple solve this problem?? I don't know, but I trust them to find a good solution. And I can't wait to have my apps running on a more portable device!
I wonder if this will play music/video like the touch. It does'nt seem that this would cut into those sales of the Touch, even if it did, because of the size. i think it will have wi-fi an BT. what else?
I think most modern PDAs do that kind of stuff so it would be silly for anything new not to. As far as I am concerned the iPod Touch is just a PDA with an iPod name.
EXCEPT SPEECH RECOGNITION!!!!!!!!!!
Will SOMEone work on that, please? It's hindering our technological advancement.
-Clive
It's bad enough putting up with boors yakking on their cell phones in public places, now we'll have to suffer geeks talking dirty to their mobile macs on top of that?
A few weeks ago, I was contemplating why Apple was pushing the resolution independence feature so heavily to developers. This is a new feature to developers in Leopard, yet it's not a major concern today. Sure, the MacBooks have resolutions up to 100dpi, but that's not a huge difference from the standard 72dpi. But, if you look at the iPhone and the new iPod nano, those handheld devices have extremely high resolutions (around 300dpi).
The iPhone and iPod touch have 163 PPI screens.
In order to come up with the size, for the mockup, I assumed the following:
1) This new handheld would leverage the same multi-touch interface as the iPhone/iPod touch.
2) In order to keep continuity of the interface, the screen would likely be the same PPI.
As such, the new 'Newton' would have a 5.5" screen to achieve a 720x480 resolution.
This could be the first Mac to dock in every area of your life.
The Home, The Car, The Office and The Pocket!!
Yeah. It looks to be about the size of the dashboard mounted navigation, telephony,
and entertainment systems in Lexus, BMW, etc. I wonder if this is the in-car device
that has been rumored. It would be cool to have an Apple UI on a removable faceplate
thingy that performed all those functions via Mac OS X.
The market for it would be everyone who has a car.
My guess is that this will lead to (not be) the tablet Mac. Size wise I'm thinking 6 to 8 inch wide-screen display, with multi-touch. O/S would be full blown OS X, limited by chipset features. It would have Wi-Fi and BlueTooth as well as USB 2.0 (or 3.0) ports for external devices and a video-out connector with support for various dongles like the current notebooks have. Video would be integrated Intel. As far as handwriting recognition goes, that would depend on the release of the unit. If it's released next year, than no handwriting recognition, but if we're talking '09, multi-touch v2 should be ready for the public, and it would become a more likely feature. The current multi-touch technology works well in a small size unit, so a lot of testing would need to be done to see if it would scale well to a larger display, as well as getting down the cost to manufacture it and sell it at a reasonable price. It wouldn't have cellular capabilities as that would require too much power for the size device. It would be flash based with no hard drive, probably in the 30 GB range.
this is starting to look a few years down the road. but it will happen! by 2012 we'll have 2TB of data in our iPod Touch 4.0s
Excuse me? Did you say 2012? 2TB?!?!
Today's iPos touch has a max of 16GB. HD capacity roughly follows Moore's Law and doubles every 24 months (not to be confused with overall performance, which doubles every 18 months). It's almost 2008, so that leaves two full cycles of Moore's Law units 2012... putting us at 64GB... 128GB at the very best. We can expect 2TB flash by 2020, maybe.
However, once we master nanotechnology, we may start falling into the "technological singularity," where devices start designing their successors... but I doubt that'll happen before 2020.
-Clive
In the other corner, we have Mac laptops with Leopard, which requires a "hefty" processor and keyboard/mouse to drive its functionality. ("hefty" only in relation to the ARM-based embedded processors.)
What types of touch-screen devices make sense in-between these two? Coming from the iPhone corner, if a device is no longer pocketable so that there could be a larger (5-9")display, but still light (9 to 14 ounces) and thin, what would we want to use it for beyond that available in iPhone/iPod Touch? Web surfing would be easier. Data input would be easier. Document viewing and editing would be easier. Movie-watching would be nicer. But what else would make a large market want this instead of iPod touch?
Coming from the Mac corner, how much can we take away from a Mac laptop and still call it a "Mac"? How much Mac capability are we willing to trade-off to get a lighter and thinner Mac? Does a Mac by definition need to run Leopard? If so, then it needs a well-powered Intel chip, which drives battery. Note that Jobs poo-pooed touch interfaces for the Mac, so then a Mac needs a keyboard/pad (speech input is still not here!). Does it need more than 64GB storage? That would require a HDD if it was released within a year which would drive battery.
Thoughts? Apple just might be listening.
Who says this is the next Newton?
Who says this is the next PDA?
Was the Newton a PDA? I think it was more than that, and in some ways, less than that.
It was ahead of its time, but the times are now way ahead of it.
This device will not be a re-invented Newton, nor will it be a PDA, nor will it be a UMPC.
It will fit exactly where millions of people want it to fit, or it won't be manufactured.
My bet is that it WILL be manufactured, and it will again change the way we work.
It will not be a small laptop. It will not be a PDA. It will not be a re-incarnation of the Newton.
It will be an "Apple-way-of-doing-things" device.
The iPhone is revolutionary as a phone. The Mac OS is clearly the best interface for a keyboard-based PC/laptop right now.
Again, think outside the box!
Put elements of the Newton, the iPod, the iPhone, the Mac, and add Apples flare for wonderful usability, size it right with the proper connections to the outside world, and you have the new device that is being talked about.
Think outside the box! Do we not know Apple well enough that they can come out with game-changing devices? If not, we should by now.
Don't think Personal Digital Assistant, think Personal Digital Life Manager... Imagine it cohesively linking your Mac, your AppleTV, your Home Theater, your Home Automation, etc. etc.
I'm putting a 50/50 guess that we will see this device by mid-year next year.
IMHO.
This thing would have to be good for train commuters, etc, and really has to have broadband. It could have both GSM and CDMA radios in it and you could use your existing company. Even if they did an exclusive with verizon, this ?? doesn't violate the ATT agreement because the thing wouldn't have a microphone... ie it's not a phone. It's a new type of device. It's an always available window into the web.
They may be trying to expand their content relationships to publishing, and do an apple print store. Read your newspapers at starbucks?
Something like this could be a hit at home also as a remote, picture frame, recipe source (imagine buying recipes for 99 cents and standing that puppy up in your kitchen).
As a market expands, more segments appear. Mobile demand will likely demand an intermediate device like this. (After all, first it was just the model T....)
Collaboration with Google when they win the 700MHz auction?
What's needed is the ability to run apps such as FileMaker. Explain to me why Palm & Windows CE devices have FileMaker Mobile and the iPhone does not. I'd also like the ability to store and display Word docs, PDF's and Excel files on a pocket device and have the ability to call them up with a few taps via a file browser and view them on a readable display. You need to be able to have a standard page width of text readable on the display without the need to zoom. The larger touch display also would allow a more usable on-screen keyboard.
Put the Mac OS on a pocket device with WiFi & Bluetooth and fully open it up to developers to port applications to - and Apple will really have something. When out of WiFi range let it connect using Bluetooth through the iPhone to the web. Lots of possibilities...
Since Apple has demonstrated what's possible with the MacOS on a portable device with the iPhone nothing would surprise me. I expect in a few years we'll be carrying the capability todays notebooks in our pockets.
There's already an online program that does this. I saw the demo several weeks ago, but I didn't bookmark it. You can enter natural language which is interpreted into calendar instructions for meetings, appointments, etc. The demo is cool, but frankly it saves only seconds.
ah yeah, use it all the time.
Folks in the inner loop refer to it as GOOGLE CALENDAR.
Nothing to see, move along.
Think outside the "box" ladies and gents.
Who says this is the next Newton?
Who says this is the next PDA?
Was the Newton a PDA? I think it was more than that, and in some ways, less than that.
It was ahead of its time, but the times are now way ahead of it.
This device will not be a re-invented Newton, nor will it be a PDA, nor will it be a UMPC.
It will fit exactly where millions of people want it to fit, or it won't be manufactured.
My bet is that it WILL be manufactured, and it will again change the way we work.
It will not be a small laptop. It will not be a PDA. It will not be a re-incarnation of the Newton.
It will be an "Apple-way-of-doing-things" device.
The iPhone is revolutionary as a phone. The Mac OS is clearly the best interface for a keyboard-based PC/laptop right now.
Again, think outside the box!
Put elements of the Newton, the iPod, the iPhone, the Mac, and add Apples flare for wonderful usability, size it right with the proper connections to the outside world, and you have the new device that is being talked about.
Think outside the box! Do we not know Apple well enough that they can come out with game-changing devices? If not, we should by now.
Don't think Personal Digital Assistant, think Personal Digital Life Manager... Imagine it cohesively linking your Mac, your AppleTV, your Home Theater, your Home Automation, etc. etc.
I'm putting a 50/50 guess that we will see this device by mid-year next year.
IMHO.
You just typed a whole lot of 'what it's not'.
What do you think it is? What is a "personal digital life manager"?
Sounds like a PDA/UMPC to me.