Toward Mac OS XX

David Pogue is talking about Mac in the past, present, and future.

Mac market is growing. It's a small part of a very large and growing pie. So Apple isn't dead and won't die. But they'll never be the big player.

The history comes first. The two Steves. They had color first. And it was the first beige machine! Heh. Steve Jobs visits PARC and gets some ideas from them. Saw the mouse, menus, and more. Decided they belonged on his computer. (Heh, Xerox invented the brain-dead business plan. They never did anything with the ideas.) The Lisa was born.

Then comes Scully, fresh from selling sugar water. It was the reality distortion field at work. Jobs went to work on the Mac project. And MacWorld magazine was born not long after. It was all GUI all the way.

Cool. System 1 screenshots. 128k and floppy. Heh.

Scully sends Jobs away and strips his responsibility. Goes off to start Next. Scully does layoffs and Windows 1.0 comes out to compete with Apple. The first color Mac comes out, as does the Newton. It flops big time.

4,000 newton modems make for great dominos.

Then came Spindler and Amelio. More Macs came out. They were all pretty boring.

Apple bought Next and got Steve back. Then came the new Macs. Flavors, cubes, and more. Lots of OS revs. Then came OS X.

And it was good.

Talks lots about all the new features in OS X.

What about the future? What'd be nice?

Icon labels, location manager, file encyrption, ram disk, Windows "send to" menu, virtual desktop (yes! I'd love that), and so on. Networking assistant would be good too. Voice and Video conferencing.

What Windows could learn from the Mac. Taste. AppleScript. Freedom from "activation". Driver invisibility. Text-to-speach. Centralized control panel. Drag-n-drop install. And uninstall. Coherent app names. One menu for software apps. The list goes on and on.

What about OS XV and beyond?

Here are some ideas. Document aging. Icons that reflect their contents. Big docs get "taller stack" icons. Screen memorizer. Broadband software. eBay for documents (clip art, music, info, etc).

RAM growth. Disk growth. Much more powerful CPUs, of course. 55 inch monitors! :-)

Seriously, CRTs are dead. Very dead. Bluetooth is a sure thing. It's going to make a big difference. Speech recognition is not the answer. Keyboards are here to stay. Battery problems won't go away for a long time.

RAM drives are coming. The USB kind. Very cool.

DVDs. CDs will go. Microsoft is here to stay too.

Windows wizards could just keep getting worse and worse.

Apple will continute to set design trends, like the iPod and the new iMac.

Posted by jzawodn at October 01, 2002 10:22 AM