
With the new year approaching, Cult of Mac invited me to speculate on what 2011 might mean for iPhone. Here's the article, originally published on Cult of Mac on 30th December, 2010.
For those new to this blog, I thought it was worth recapping our greatest hits to date. Obviously, we don't always get it right, but this blog has had a pretty good track record of Apple predictions over the past four years - more so than most analysts that cover Apple. Hmm, why do I do this for fun, rather than earning a six figure salary on Wall Street? Oh, yeah, I hate wearing suits ;)
Speculative mockup of a Finder window for 10.5 proved to be almost identical to the image that subsequently appeared on Apple.com - right down to the document thumbnails used.
When Apple teased us with "There's something in the air" posters, we were the first to correctly call it. 9to5Mac even guessed that we were Apple insiders. Seriously.
5th generation iPod nano, May 2008
Two years before Apple launched the multi-touch 5th gen iPod nano, we published an almost identical image. Could Apple be following this blog?
When most bloggers thought Apple's rumored tablet would be based upon Snow Leopard, we were one of the few to consistently predict a giant iPod touch - with a pretty accurate mockup published a full year before iPad's launch.
Our mockups were a little off on this one, but we nailed the name, when most pundits were guessing iPhone 4G or iPhone HD.
"In January, Japanese touch-screen maker Nissha also licensed the approach from Yorkshire-based Peratech, who make the composite material QTC.However, as part of the licensing agreements, Peratech could not reveal the phone, gaming, and device makers that could soon be using the technology to bring pressure sensitivity to a raft of new devices."
Beware the echo chamber of the blogosphere. If you listen to too many geek-blogs, you might get a skewed perspective and end up spending a fortune on ads with indecipherable headlines like "multi-multitasking" .
Nokia currently has an ad running with the headline "multi-multitasking," and an extremely busy screenshot of many windows open and crammed into a small mobile phone display. At the tiny size of these windows, any text is rendered unreadably small, and thus the contents of these windows are incomprehensible.
The term "multi-multistasking" is not the most user friendly, and the accompanying image serves to illustrate all of the problems associated with enabling multiple applications to run concurrently in a compact handheld device.
Since this image and headline reveal such an evident shortcoming in the product category, it may seem like an odd approach for Nokia's marketing bods to take. One might wonder why they don't instead focus on some of the advantages of smart phones. The explanation lies in their paranoid desire to differentiate themselves from Apple's iPhone, combined with a bad habit of spending excessive time reading geek blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget, (full disclosure: I confessed to being guilty of this same addiction).
As any geek will tell you - the iPhone's achilles heel is its inability to multitask. The argument goes that whereas other devices let you run as many apps as you like, with iPhone, Apple restricts you to one app at a time, and this is a problem. This argument is erroneous on three counts: 1. the iPhone does support multitasking, it just doesn't allow third party apps to run in the background; 2. this is a deliberate design decision on Apple's part - they chose to disable it, rather than struggling to enable it; and most important of all 3. if this is such a shortcoming, why is the iPhone so insanely popular and why are all the other handset manufacturers perpetually trying to ape it?
The fact that the iPhone does not support background applications is not a shortcoming, it is a deliberate design decision. Apple judges the improvements in battery life, performance and user experience (associated with restricting background processes) to be of greater value to the majority of users than the ability to run multiple third party applications at once. Of course, they make an exception to this rule for certain of their own key applications: such as the Phone app (you need calls to come through when you're in a different app) and the iPod app (you want to be able to listen to music regardless of whatever else you're doing). And the result is a phone that is perfect for the vast majority of users - and the tiny subset who would prefer shorter battery life, poor performance and multi-multitasking are free to go buy a Nokia... or better still to jailbreak their iPhone and "multi-multitask" to their heart's content.
Nokia are not the first to mistake Apple's design decision for a weakness. When Palm launched the Palm Pre, they put multitasking at the heart of their marketing campaign. 12 months later, the product is all but forgotten. Interestingly, the one company that can always be relied upon to faithfully copy Apple's ideas is at it again. The word is that Microsoft are removing the ability to run applications in the background from Windows Mobile 7.
It was 11 months ago that this blog first proposed the idea of a tablet computer based upon the iPhone OS. 10 months ago, we published a visual of it, that was picked up by numerous blogs around the world.
There were those who scoffed back in April 2009, arguing that the Apple tablet would run Mac OS X, not the iPhone OS. But over recent months, the rumor mill has come around to MacPrediction's way of thinking.
Another prediction that this blog made a couple of years ago also looks set to become reality this week - with the imminent arrival of iWork Touch and iLife Touch.
Plus, we've speculated about the introduction of a notification screen as part of the home screen of the iPhone OS - with the extra screen real estate of the new iSlate, this is likely to finally become a reality.
Finally, two years ago, we proposed a re-brand for the iPhone OS, to clear up confusion with Mac OS X, and clarify that it runs on more devices than just phones. This prediction also seems likely to come true next week.
Apple has always referred to both their Mac and iPhone OSs as "OS X," but contrary to popular belief, they have never describe the iPhone OS as "Mac OS X". It seems that Apple uses the brand "OS X" to refer to Darwin, the Mach 3.0 and FreeBSD 5 layers of their OS, plus various other libraries such as the QuickTime media layer. On top of this, they have two different flavours of windowing system - the one which runs on Macs, which is currently called "Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard," and the other, which runs on iPhones and iPod Touch, and soon the iSlate/iPad, which is informally referred to as the iPhone OS. It really is high time they gave it a proper name. Maybe with version 4.0, and the new tablet, it will finally get the name it deserves.
If all of the above happens next week, this blog is throwing a party, and you're all invited ;)