Crystal balls
If even tech analysts can predict the future, how hard can it be?
First published in MacUser Vol 28 No 25, 7 December 2012
It’s that time again when our thoughts turn to the technological innovations we can expect over the next twelve months. But alas, we’re not Psychic Sally or Gene Munster so we don’t know what they’ll be. Let’s guess then.
iPad maxi Oh, you laugh at the name — but you laughed when Phil Schiller first said ‘iPad’, and who looks silly now? Yes, 2013 will be the year of the iPad maxi. Or possibly the first half of it will be that, and then Apple will launch something that already makes it obsolete and nobody will mention it again. Anyway, the iPad maxi of course is the form factor that the iPad really should have had from the beginning: 1.6 metres wide, so it fits naturally into your arm span, and perfectly square, because if it was widescreen you wouldn’t be able to pick it up easily. You see, Apple’s genius is that it actually thinks these things through.
At 16,384 × 16,384 pixels, the iPad maxi’s stunning (literally, if you drop it) Retina display is driven by a bank of proprietary GPUs that fill half of its interior, the other half being packed with Li-Ion cells to give the same ten-hour battery life! The iPad maxi is slightly thicker, at 174mm, and a little heavier, at 28kg. But when you see the three biology textbooks already available on the new iBooks 3.5 format in America — well, it’s amazing how a new thing makes the old thing look old.
Twitter mittens There are gloves that enable you to type on a touchscreen. So why not gloves that prevent you? These finest-quality Twitter mittens will keep your fingers warm and your powder dry. As you type into your favourite Twitter app (or in 2013 most likely the Twitter website, Twitter having finally killed all the third-party apps and not bothered to update its own), the mittens divert your input to a data centre in Turkmenistan that Googles every name, reference and in-joke in your text, then cross-references it against an extensive database of libel plaintiffs, misleading BBC documentaries, outstanding s39 orders, unilateral CPS interpretations of forgotten communications laws originally drafted for Morse operators, litigious pharmaceutical companies, bored coppers, easily offended celebrities and Graham Linehan’s moods, then tweets only the safe portion.
Most often this will consist purely of inanities, random punctuation and cat pictures, but after a brief acclimatisation you’ll find a whole community of like-minded tweeters with whom to share your entirely innocuous thoughts until, unhampered by the free expression of independent views, your government shuts down the internet, then deports you to Turkmenistan under a new extradition treaty that it negotiated to secure eight jobs at a walking-stick factory in a UKIP-leaning constituency. So now who has the toastiest hands in the gulag?
iMac 2013 Techniques like friction-stir welding might sound incredibly clever — if they actually worked, obviously — but Apple is fast approaching the limit of how thin an iMac can get. And while users might not care if the brand new 13in Retina MacBook in their satchel is mysteriously thicker than the 15in, nobody wants a heavy, bulky machine sitting permanently in one place on their desktop.
Fortunately, Jonathan Ive has come up with a solution as radical as 1998’s very first iMac. For autumn 2013, Apple will unveil a desktop Mac that’s so thin, it doesn’t contain a processor, storage or interfaces. How is this possible? By moving them into a large and sturdy aluminium box that you simply slide under your desk. Since it doesn’t have to be some random function-denying Giacometti fan club shape that came to Jonathan Ive in a fever dream one night after too many Jägerbombs with the Marc Newson catalogue, this radical new Mac can actually accommodate any storage device or graphics card you want to install in it. And that’s why we call it magical.
