Although our record is sullied by a few occasional missteps generally caused by a lone rumor- monger tickling our plush, erogenous wishful thinking zones, the Internet’s grown remarkably adept at seeing new Apple products coming. Most gadget bloggers and tech pundits would be willing to part with a digit if Apple doesn’t at least announce a tablet next year: there are just too many supply reports, patent and trademark filings and industry insiders telling us to expect one. The same was true with the iPhone: we all knew an Apple phone was coming. We were just laughably wrong about what the iPhone turned out to be.
It’s worth keeping that in mind as we come up on January’s presumed announcement of Apple’s tablet: the chances of it being what we expect (a large iPhone) are probably as wrong as our belief that the iPhone would be just an iPod with a SIM card in it. To remind us all of exactly how wrong our predictions were, Technologizer’s Harry McCracken has posted up a fantastic speculative prehistory of the iPhone, correlating all of the earliest predictions about what the iPhone was going to be and then fact-checking them against reality.
It’s a great read. What’s really curious about the piece, though, is how much weirder speculation of the iPhone’s capabilities became as it drew close to a launch. Over four years before the iPhone was unveiled, and only ten months after the iPod’s debut, John Markoff of the New York Times, speculated that the iPhone (he even gets the name right!) would be a mobile computer, more PDA than mobile phone, running OS X, instead of just an iPod that makes telephone calls. That prediction doesn’t encompass the hardware or the App Store, but is still a perfect description of what the iPhone would turn out to be. But fast forward two years, and Michelle Meyers at CNet is predicting a combination iPod and Blackberry called the AppleBerry!
That’s just the problem with gadget fans overeagerly waiting for a new Apple product after a long and fruitless rumor cycle: the centrifuges of their imaginations go crashing through the containing wall of their common sense. If Apple is good at any one thing, it is taking the core concept of a new device and stripping it down until it is a sublimely perfect device that “just works.” They did it with the iPhone, and it would be a fool’s bet to say that they won’t do it again with the Tablet. The Apple Tablet won’t be the device we expect, but in retrospect, it’ll seem like the only tablet Apple could have ever made.
