One of the last unfinished thoughts Steve Jobs left us with was textbooks. Walter Isaacson’s seminal biography of the Apple co-founder teased that the next textbook publishing was the next industry the iconic technology visionary was seeking to revolutionize. That was the promise and today Apple has delivered the vision, as well as the tools — iBooks, iTunes U, iBook Author — to make it happen.
A regular question from my kids is, “If we won the lottery, where would we live?” Some folks, it’s not a question idle speculation. That said, although he hasn’t won the lottery, per se, Tim Cook has come into money, a lot of money. Nevertheless, like Steve Jobs, Apple’s current CEO doesn’t live in a huge house behind guarded gates. In fact, this blogger’s house is not much smaller than his.
About a year after Apple and Intel began rolling out Thunderbolt. Though every current Mac, except the company’s long-in-the-tooth pro tower, offers this super fast connection standard, there have been few peripherals designed to take advantage of it. That’s changing at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.
More than a decade after Steve Jobs introduced the world to iTunes and the iPod, digital music sales have surpassed physical media. Although the Apple visionary didn’t live to see the day, he certainly foresaw the eventually and played a pivotal role and, in fact, declared way back then that he was out revolutionize music.
When the original iMac shipped back in August 1998, the industry and its various hangers on (analysts) variously and collectively stated that the form factor was just so 1984. A dozen plus years later and Apple has the hottest product in this fast growing all-in-one category.
With the ongoing iOS-ification of the Mac in the form of OS X Lion, which incidentally lots of people hate, not to mention the fact that Apple makes the vast majority of its money on things other than high-powered tower computers, lots of people have speculated that the Mac Pro will be discontinued.
Apple has the operating system, app + gaming ecosystem and even has an excellent piece of hardware already in place — why, oh, why haven’t they let the genie out of the bottle? It would be awesome and no further proof thereof is needed than this fresh hack from Steven Troughton-Smith and TheMudKip.
Come Monday morning, or whenever he gets back to his 1 Infinite Loop studio in Cupertino, California, I suspect Apple senior vice president of design will be in for a bit of good natured ribbing. To whit he could reply, whilst looking condescendingly down his nose, “That’s, Sir Jonny, to you, peasant.”
Steve Jobs famously declared that 2010 would be the year of the iPad and that came true big time. When he introduced the Apple’s second generation tablet, he likewise said 2011 would be the year of the iPad 2 and, even though the official tallies won’t be in for weeks, there’s no question how well that’s worked out. But, it seems that was all just a warm up.
Roll your eyes and groan — here comes a rumorological musing fresh from the Silicon Isle. Yup, Taiwan and that invariably means DigiTimes. Whereas I’ve studiously avoided reporting the latest Apple TV — a real, honest-to-goodness television — emanations wafting on the breeze from that source, discernible and believable patterns are forming.
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