Speculating about future Apple products is really hard to do well. That doesn’t keep everyone from trying. Even grizzled Apple-watching veterans often fail catastrophically with each new Apple announcement.
The reason it’s difficult is that “evidence,” which would normally be the best tool for predicting things, doesn’t work in Apple’s case.
The best criteria are strategic and cultural analyses. But even these are not perfectly reliable.
If you’ve struggled to accurately guess in the past what Apple will announce, don’t feel bad. Even Apple executives themselves don’t know until often very late in the game.
Ken Segall, who named the iMac and worked on the “Think Different” campaign, has some choice takeaways from working with Steve Jobs that he’s finally sharing in book form with Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success.
The cleanly-designed cover in Apple’s signature Myriad typeface looks almost like it should be unboxed; inside you’ll find choice insider tales of the flops, false starts and history made with Apple over the 12 years he worked with the Cupertino company. (You can read an exclusive excerpt from Insanely Simple and our review of the book here.)
Segall tells Cult of Mac about the reasoning behind that lowercase “i,” winning Jobs over and what happened when ads flopped. You can catch up with him through his blog or Facebook page, where you’ll also find details about his upcoming book tour.
WIMP computing was invented during the Nixon Administration.
In 1973, Xerox PARC developed the Alto computer, the first to use all the WIMP elements of windows, icons, menus and a pointing device, also known as a mouse.
And it’s in this nearly 40-year-old paradigm that we find ourselves trapped by a quirk of human nature: We’re creatures of habit. We don’t like to change the way we do things. And so here we are, still using a mouse (most of us, anyway).
The Finder's new iCloud view works just like iOS. Screenshot: Pocket Lint
With Mountain Lion, Apple has finally tied iCloud to the Mac desktop. While iCloud has worked seamlessly on iOS since launch, moving documents between iCould and your Mac was embarrassingly awkward, involving web browsers, dragging and dropping.
Now, it has been shoved deep into the heart of the OS, in the form of a kind of alternate Finder.
Never in the history of consumer electronics has there been a computer more universally desirable than the Apple iPad.
Market share numbers — 83% of the market — hint at the popularity and market dominance of the iPad.
But here’s the most interesting fact about the iPad’s incredible success that most people overlook: The qualities that make iPad desirable are replicable on bigger platforms — and may even be magnified by them. Which is why it’s perfectly reasonable to predict dominant market share for the iOS-like Mac desktops of the future.
First, let’s understand the unprecedented popularity of the iPad.
In the 50s, some futurists predicted food pills instead of meals. It never happened.
The biggest reason futurists fail is that too many predictions are based on the possible, rather than the desirable.
It’s now possible for anyone to take all their nutrition from pills. But people enjoy eating food. That’s why we don’t take pills instead.
If you want to predict the future, you need to deconstruct human nature. You also need to know what will be possible. Where these two things intersect is where accurate predictions can be made.
And that’s why I can already tell you what your iMac will be like in a few years.
Planted in your shiny new iPhone 4s and in the iOS 5 are the seeds of tomorrow’s Mac of the future, and indeed the future of all computers. You can find them if you know where to look. (And I’ll tell you where below.)
It’s not supposed to be this way. In the Microsoft world, at least, new technology starts at the top and “trickles down” from bigger and more powerful computers over time to mobile devices and eventually cell phones. If you’re focused on the machines, this makes sense, as larger computers are more capable of handling powerful new features.
But if you’re focused on the user, as Apple is, this approach doesn’t make sense. Apple has developed what I believe is a unique strategy: introduce new interfaces and new ways to interact with computers and the Internet on the smallest devices first, then scale them up over time, eventually ending up as desktop features.
If you didn’t hear the news, Cult of Mac hit 100,000 Twitter followers last week. To celebrate, we hosted a huge giveaway yesterday on Twitter. Because some people were sad that they didn’t come away with a prize, we’ve decided to extend the celebration farther into the week and give readers a few more chances to win. Today we’re giving away a Logitech Wireless Solar Keyboard for Mac. It’s one of the coolest new keyboards we’ve seen because you don’t have to keep spare batteries on hand anymore. If you want a shot at winning this beautiful thing here are the rules for today’s contest:
There have been a some reports that followed the release of Mac OS X Lion from iMac users complaining about graphic or video problems.
One user reports that he’s been experiencing video artifacts on his 2011 27-inch iMac configured with a 3.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 and AMD Radeon HD 6970M graphics processor with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. It’s been fairly intermittent and it always disappears for a while after a restart.
Today the problem was so different and a lot worse than usual that they finally decided to call AppleCare.
![Ken Segall On What Made Apple’s Insanely Simple Approach Work [Q&A]](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Ken-Segall-c-Doug-Schneider-NEW1.jpg "Ken Segall (c) Doug Schneider NEW")
WIMP computing was invented during the Nixon Administration.
![Switch To “Two Week” View In iCal [OS X Tips]](http://cultofmac.cultofmaccom.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/icaltwoweeks.jpg)
