I’m a Mac user from ‘84 on and am embarrassed to have never visited this site before. This site looks like it will be home with lots of high caliber company.

My contribution to this thread is a simple idea I almost never hear mentioned.

The answer to the portable screen size dilemma is to make the screen wearable. I’m talking a near eye display Apple style, that is 1920 x 1200 with a 70 degree field of view located below the glasses as either monocular or binocular (hello 3D). Don’t let Microsoft anywhere near this or we’ll all end up looking like the Borg. Team up with Oakley. Make the display OLED with optics from Canon or Nikon so the screen focuses to correspond to any desired distance in the environment. The screen would be below the glasses and very tiny and thin with aluminum enclosure, very Apple.

Regaining desktop screen real estate would be a big win and a relief to everyone growing tired of looking at postage stamp images. But that’s not all because head tracking accelerometers in the glasses would enable head tracking for games sure, but why not use head tracking so that slight head motion moves you around a virtual apparently contiguous 4096 x 1760 or even larger virtual desktop. Spaces on steriods.

The glasses are integrated with noise cancelling microphones and serve as the phone and voice recorder mics. Ambient sound awareness is simply implemented by opening a human voice frequency window in the noise cancellation which allows voice through the noise cancellation. You could even adjust the mix to reinforce the ambient sound in relation to music or podcasts. Then whole offices could be listening to headphones yet able to converse easily. There would be no technical reason to ban such a device from the workplace.

Before high quality compact headphones you had the spectacle of people dragging around “boom boxes”.
Until high quality, attractive, extremely small near eye displays are offered we will continue to be limited to cell phones and laptops.

I will only be satisfied when Apple make a wearable box to drive this display. It would be small enough to wear in a coat pocket, butt bag, shoulder holster, purse and would have the identical functionality of a MacBook Pro except it would dock via FW3200 to minimize port real estate. It would retain the cell phone card port to rapidly adapt to evolving cell networks.

Input would be via a BlueTooth multitouch track pad about the size of the Nano which can operate from inside a pocket or decorated and worn around the neck as an amulet to ward off the Borg. The touch pad can, when needed, be attached to a BlueTooth, full size, fabric keyboard which can be rolled up and pocketed. This bluetooth trackpad would replace all the Apple remotes to run multitouch on the Apple TV. QUERTY sucks anyway and I look forward to fast one-handed “chording keyboards that people would never part with and carry for use with any computer they encounter.

I think this form factor has enough utility to heavily impinge on the cell phone and laptop markets. It leapfrogs all the problems and goes directly to the same inevitable solution the audio world adopted.

I’m a retired cinematographer so I’ll relate my vision in an example based on experience.

What if every member of a movie production crew wore such a device with a live 1920 x 1200 view of the active camera view. An electrician on a 30 foot scaffold controlling a light could see the exact result of aiming it and nail it without all the radio chatter and with both hands free and no orders needed.

What if a mechanic leaning over a car holding two wrenches can apply torque to the fastener while glancing down at the manual.

What if everybody buying a personal digital universe could buy still and video cameras that were just boxes with lenses remotely controled or head mounted feeding Final Cut Pro running on the wearable MacBook Pro. Just how much cheaper could cameras be with all of the heavy lifting of CPU, GPU, RAM no longer needlessly duplicated in the box wearing the lens. Basically a Nikon, Canon, etc iSight on steroids and much cheaper than the “full featured” cameras today. In a tough spot at a news conference at the back of a crowd? Tape your camera to a pole and fly it over the crowd. On a tight timeline? Its already captured to final cut. You can start editing during the shoot and check matched action between cuts.

The mind boggles.

Not only do you only need to glance down at the screen, but sunlight that normally washes out the screen is blocked by the wearer plus a small shroud around the screen. Low resolution and sun washout are the only reasons I still use an optical viewfinder. Handled.

I probably don’t need to elaborate on the obvious massive benefit on battery life.

What’s not to like? It won’t replace everybody’s MacBook Air plus iPhone ever, but there are thousands of similar applications just begging for this solution.

I think this concept is viral, executed by Apple at least, and could completely change the paradigm of what portability really means.

If you like this idea, let’s gang up on Apple and demand they build it. There’s no new software at all needed. The hardware can be shrunk with existing parts. The push is on meeting Apples strict sense of when the quality of the display meets their standards and none do currently. This is one productive development cycle worthy of some of Apple’s reserve finances. There are several near-eys display companys who could push up the resolution and reduce size given the promise of volume consumer adoption.

I think it was Apple Incider that posted a link to an Apple near-eye display patent filing. It mentioned laser mechanisms as tentative. So this whole subject has been at least entertained at Apple.

Let’s call them “look-down” displays to dispel the image of Mr. Magoo running into a wall muttering, “blasted computers!”. I’m actually quite serious about this and if I had a prototype to show I’d scheme my way into Steve’s office, show him and make him at least think about it. It would top an untopable career.

many commercial handheld devices and scanners [such as those made by symbol and powered by microsoft - like most delivery companies and retail outlets use - including apple] are bulky and nearly inoperable half the time - an iphone with ocr software could replace them for the same cost in a heartbeat.

wireless data communication between dvices opens many potential avenues for retail purposes, in effect becoming the new POS
in fact, if you could use your iphone to ring up items as you shopped and then send that data to the checker’s
computer along with your credit info, checking out would be nearly instantaneous - you wouldn’t even need a bag if you brought your own!

i could spend all night dreaming along this line…
MS surface is cool, but even in their demos i’ve noticed hiccups. perceptive pixel will be riding the multitouch wave, hopefully with apple.

Sometimes, that wait is because the hardware isn’t ready or is uneconomical. Another reason is that the software can be too early or won’t accommodate legacy hardware and software.

Obsolete equipment and business concepts are cheap and it often takes time to persuade people to give them up. That is why it took Apple ten years to begin to move beyond MacOS 9 and the Carbon API’s. That is starting to happen, now. Apple can begin to implement the NeXTstep technologies which they had wanted for Rhapsody in 1998.

Apple has had to play a waiting game or even to lie when the hardware, which would lead to the future, couldn’t quite cut it. Wintel was pushing the market in a direction that Apple didn’t want to take, but couldn’t avoid.

Almost all the innovation in Wintel in the last ten years was on the hardware side. Dell capitalized on cheapness. Cheapness is fine if there are no further improvements in software technology. R&D cost money. Lowest bidder won’t pay for it. All this was to Apple’s disadvantage.

Apple had to wait until the consequences of Wintel’s business plan had set in. That wait is almost over. Wintel’s market is stagnant. The Wintel hardware is about as cheap as it is going to get; the Megahertz wars have run out. The desktop computer will fragment. Software is going to start to matter more.

Microsoft’s OS is aligned to the old desktop business model. A paradigm shift is coming. Changes in hardware will cause it, but it will require improved software to take advantage of it. Microsoft is stuck in the past trying to hang onto its monopoly. Apple is ready for the new age of computing to dawn. How it will turn out is still a mystery.

64 bit Mac OSX Leopard is a great achievement for two reasons: it provides Apple a roadmap for letting go of Carbon in five years and it allows Apple to rapidly move forward to technologies which have been waiting in the wings.

Microsoft Vista is still in the development hell that Apple went through with Mac OSX six years ago. Vista is an improvement over Window XP in many ways, but it is not yet a modern operating system. Microsoft has billions of dollars to throw at Vista to improve it, but, as it found with the Longhorn OS, too many cooks can spoil the soup.

Meanwhile, Apple has had to pay the bills with business plans which don’t give the consumer as much choice as we would like. The iPod and the iPhone are a tiny portion of the “digital hub” that Apple has been promoting since 2002. The next step that Apple and Intel is moving toward is ubiquity and low cost.

Apple is being cagy; it cannot afford to directly confront Microsoft. Microsoft thinks it has time to make the changes to adapt to new developments. It believes that it can afford to retard developments in the way it did with Intel’s EPIC. But, Intel has a technology partner in Apple which is just as hungry as it is. I expect major changes are in the offing that won’t start to happen until next year. The changes will catch people by surprise and no one more than Microsoft.

Interesting. The firewire iSight camera was a great product. Still sells for up to $200us on eBay. I keep mine for shooting stop-motion animations.

Why did Apple never want to do, with the iSight/iChat combo, for video what they did with iPod/iTunes? No content/revenue stream of course. But don’t we understand that it’s the hardware that Apple really wants to sell, not the content? And surely Skype suggests there was a business model for iChat.

I have thought for a long time that Apple’s business model is poorly thought out. What I mean here is each time they come out with an update to a newer version of a product, they usually force you to buy the new version, rather than upgrading your current, pefectly usable version.. (iPod 5th gen and then the updated 5th gen iPod). I know some products can’t or won’t be handled this way, such as macs themselves..

With the iPhone/iPod touch, Apple could capitalize on existing hardware and give people something ‘new’ to purchase alongside it. Say for instance they come out with an update that turns it into a remote control. They could sell additional hardware that will make it work with your existing stereo equipment.. Also, additional hardware sales could be for home automation equipment.. Light switches, etc.. The software is free and works with your mac and iPod/iPhone, but the extra hardware makes more money, without alienating people who already have one by making them buy the ‘new’ version.

Slightly off topic, but I had always thought apple should come out with a windows version of iChat.. Not to help windows at all, but to sell more iSights to more people.. See, more hardware sales..

Since the iPod/iPhone has a display that can show anything, it truly can empower more sales of additional add on components.

Me? I want a multitouch bluetooth keyboard: No mouse. No remote. Nice!

I expect that as computer-on-a-chip processors become ubiquitous and cheap that the numbers of such wireless devises will mushroom. You don’t want them to invade your network, so they must be controlled. How?

I remember reading about an Apple patent last year for a wireless devise that had a range of less than a foot. What use is that? Quite a lot, if it is used as a central network control point. If you lay a devise, such as a laptop, iPhone or camera, on the top of it, inside an Airport Express say, then your home or business network would recognize it, define its permissions and set up the encryption system that you use on your wireless network. It would be easy and fast, but there would be good controls on it, too.

I expect the number of security cameras, temperature gauges and other such devises to vastly expand. You could use your iPhone to control a number of devises around the home or office. You could change the routing of images to monitors in other rooms, say, as you walk from your living room to your bedroom.

Apple seems to be preparing for that. If it is not ready in 2009, then it will happen soon afterwards.