One thing that is NOT entirely speculative is they didnt develop Multi-touch for use with one product.
Aside from the fact that Apple didn't develop multitouch, but they have a product using it, I think this is quite the case.
There have been successive steps taken through various patent filings, the iPhone product introduction, job postings, etc. that all point toward a particular product development roadmap that began with iPhone.
But iPhone is just the beginning. It now appears that an entire class of devices are being planned, from PDA/phones to tablet PCs, that would all likely incorporate multitouch.
I spoke with a former Apple Engineer and he wasn't surprised. He noted that Apple will typically put out a feeler product like iPhone and then send their customer engineers to get feedback on the device to identify what the public likes, dislikes, wants, doesn't need, etc. and then wrap their industrial design around that feedback while in the prototype stage for products that harness more of the technologies they tested with the "feeler" products, on a grander scale.
One can trace the immediate evolution of Apple's use of capacitance sensors to the 2nd generation iPod (for those who forget, the very first had a physical scrollwheel that rotated), and through the new mouse (I checked, it's got to be capacitance sensing because only skin contact triggers the buttons)...
The iPhone is the first full product built around this type of user input... and there are more to come. Surely, just as my friend was suggesting Apple's probably already testing prototypes of a multitouch UI and a multitouch Mac, patent filings emerged which suggested precisely that direction.
How long will it be? Under Steve Jobs' direction, Apple's product development cycles have been typically 2-3 years... that is, two to three years from concept to market. Yes, that fast...
Let's face it, Apple does not rest on their laurels waiting for anyone to catch up. The analysts thought Apple was going to have a tough road getting Intel Macs out within a year because they were estimating it would take an additional two to five years before Apple's OS would be developed to run on Intel. Lo and behold Apple stunned the analysts when announcing that all versions of OS X since 10.1 were already written as dual binaries. That means Apple's product development was FIVE YEARS ahead of the analysts expectations. That's humongous in terms of the computing industry.
So, here we are thinking what's Apple going to do next. Well, it should be obvious they've been thinking about that for several years already. By the time the Cingular talks started, the sketches were probably going up on the drawing board for the next product... and if they're filing patents now that means they've got working prototypes that they can no longer protect from intelligence leaks. That's about the time Apple files its patents for anyone who's been paying attention.
So, where are we headed from here? I think multitouch opens up some fantastic doors to degrees and axes of input that we haven't even thought of yet... and dimensions of feedback that parallel real-world object interaction as closely as possible in a two-dimensional space. I think we'll see in three years time an interface as fundamentally intuitive as the multitouch UI of the Pre-Crime computer in "Minority Report". No, I don't mean standing up in front of a huge transparent screen getting tired by waving your arms about all day... but the same basic type of gesturing, interaction and hierarchical organization with fluid graphics and animations.
And if you think that's unrealistic then you're giving my imagination and intuition more credit than Jony Ive's.
phone is NOT a "Mac".
