March 21, 2007 at 3:01 pm
I was reading a blog post about someone who was holding out on buying a new Mac because he's waiting to see what they come out with next. He was wondering about what Apple would do, and said, “perhaps something radical like a new case design.”
I can sympathize with wanting to be on the cutting edge, but I'm not sure I would describe a new case design as radical. To me, radical is something more fundamental than a case design. I don't mean to jab at the blogger over his choice of words, but I nonetheless felt that it was a good setup to list some things I think would be cool (radical, even) for Apple to do.
I wrote earlier about how I thought a television with a built-in Apple TV would be cool, and that's an example of something I would call radical.
I would like a MacBook or iMac wherein the iSight is in the display itself, rather than above it. Apple actually filed for a patent for a technology where a large number of tiny cameras were placed between the pixels in a display. The advantage is that when you look at your display while your camera is capturing video, you will look like you're looking at the camera (because you actually are), rather than looking at a point below the camera's lens.
If (when?) Apple releases an iTablet, I would expect it to have multi-touch, and for them to take it a long way. I wouldn't expect them to just touch-enable the OS X interface and call it a day. I would imagine that they would make an application like Front Row, except it would be optimized for multi-touch instead of a remote, and it would control much of your Mac instead of just your media. Imagine the iPhone interface on a 13.3 inch screen.