It seems like only yesterday that Macworld released its first issue, with a youthful, besuited Steve Jobs peering over a trio of original Macs on the cover.
OK, maybe not yesterday. But those 25 years seem to have come and gone as quickly as so many Apple CEOs. And that quarter of a century has given us the countless advances and changes – in software, hardware design, operating systems, and more – that make the Mac what it is today.
But that’s the old news. What’s more important is what your Mac will be like next year, or the year after that, or five years from now. How will Apple’s ongoing endeavours and other technological developments affect the devices you use in the near future?
In this article, we take a look at how some of today’s trends are driving the technology of tomorrow, as well as how some of the past 25 years’ significant events brought us to where we are today. We’ve also asked some longtime members of the Mac community to share their thoughts on various aspects of the last two and a half decades.
What next for the Mac interface
However, not all – not even most – of those patents will see the light of day. We doubt, for example, that Apple is likely to replace the Mighty Mouse with a new input device based on filing patent #20070152966, titled “Mouse with Optical Sensing Surface,” which spends 35 pages detailing a mouse whose entire shapely body is a Multi-Touch display.
Still, although patent spelunking may not be an infallible way to divine exactly what products will emerge from One Infinite Loop, it is an excellent way to gain insight into what’s going on in the minds of Apple’s development team. A quick look at Apple’s most recent filings shows that interface design is clearly a front-and-centre concern.
Take, for example, filings for hardware devices. The frequently rumoured Multi-Touch tablet Mac has its own 52-page filing, complete with interface details that include a full-size virtual keyboard and resizable interface elements. If you don’t want to actually touch your display, Apple also has you covered – with a filing for a proximity-sensing display that can tell not only where and how close your fingers are, but also how fast they’re moving toward or away from the display’s surface.
For people who prefer devices with a physical interface, Apple has filed a patent for a keyboard with OLED-display keys that change appearance depending on what you’re up to, another for a 3-D remote control that’s intriguingly Nintendo Wii–like, and yet another for a holographic display that provides a 3-D experience without geeky glasses.
Some filings seem designed to work together. Take, for example, the intriguingly conceptual “Multi-Touch Data Fusion” filing, which melds a Multi-Touch display with other interface technologies such as an accelerometer, force sensors, facial-expression detection, eye-tracking, and pupil-dilation and voice-command recognition. Pair that filing with an earlier one for a “Multi-Touch Gesture Dictionary,” which assigns different meanings to different hand gestures, and you’re headed into a brave new world of computer control – one first hinted at by the four-fingered touchpads on Apple’s current laptops.
Most filings are less groundbreaking but still worth noting – for instance, the not-so-euphoniously named “Cursor for Presenting Information Regarding Target,” which enables QuickLook-like previews when you move your mouse over file icons and hyperlinks, and the equally wonderfully named “Enhancing Online Shopping Atmosphere,” which describes a Second Life–like avatar-based shopping experience, complete with helpful virtual experts (not referred to in the filing, however, as geniuses).
One recent filing that we hope comes to fruition describes giving iTunes the ability to use your Mac to broadcast all of its stored tunes to your iPod or iPhone wirelessly. If this dream becomes reality, you’ll no longer be limited by the storage capacity of your iPod, but only by its ability to connect to the Net.
There are a few holes in Apple’s patent-protected future, however, even in areas where other engineers are hard at work. For example, we couldn’t find any filings for brainwave-controlled input devices or for acoustically activated virtual keyboards.
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25 Years of the Mac: How Apple created new type of user-interface
