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Steve Jobs Envisioned the iPad in 1983

arunim said:
And this is news? How? front page???
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Hey, I'm still waiting for you to invent something on this magnitude. Oh wait, that will never happen, will it? This is news because this is well...Macrumors. Steve Jobs was CEO of Apple for a long time, did you somehow miss that while you were inventing stuff? Gah, there I go again...
 
i don't think it was Steve Jobs that came up with this idea....Stanley Kubrick depicted an Ipad like device in his 2001 A Space Odyssey. Check it out.
 
kdarling said:
Everybody and their brother had a vision of a computer in a book back then...

Mostly because of Alan Kay and his Dynabook concept from 1968:

YouTube: video
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Brilliant! Thanks for posting.

I'm a nobody in the tech world, and even I gave a speech in the nineties about a single device we would one day carry in our pockets that would replace phone, watch, wallet, keys, etc—and that the Internet would become so ubiquitous we would stop even referring to it as the Internet in everyday usage. I may have been wrong about that last point, but obviously the smart phone is slowly becoming the device I, and no doubt lots of other people, imagined.

Not taking anything away from Steve's genius. But like kdarling said, the ideas were floating around for a long time before it became technically feasible.
 
pig pile said:
i don't think it was Steve Jobs that came up with this idea....Stanley Kubrick depicted an Ipad like device in his 2001 A Space Odyssey. Check it out.
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Really? Wow, I will check it out!! Thanks for the tip, you should go to all the other Apple blogs and sites and spread the word!
 
kalsta said:
Not taking anything away from Steve's genius. But like kdarling said, the ideas were floating around for a long time before it became technically feasible.
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Taking nothing away from the visions that other people came up with a long time before, Steve actually made the vision an elegant, practical, economic, and easily-usable reality.
 
liavman said:
Now everyone asks 'What would Steve Jobs have done?' for every little thing. I think he has institutionalized his thinking in Apple using many means and I think there is at least a chance that the senior management in Apple can get an approximate answer to that question. That is the legacy that hopefully Steve jobs had left behind.
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One could argue against this, citing the various Apple "missteps" in the last 6 months.

The "magic" is gone, and there's no RDF to put it back. And a lot of Apple's market cap depends on the belief in "magic".

Even worse - Apple is losing its "cool factor".

And look at the thread on Forbes around If Steve Jobs Were Alive, He Would Fire Tim Cook. (Read the associated threads as well, such as one which argued that it would be "un-Buddhist" to fire Cook.)
 
AidenShaw said:
One could argue against this, citing the various Apple "missteps" in the last 6 months.

The "magic" is gone, and there's no RDF to put it back. And a lot of Apple's market cap depends on the belief in "magic".

Even worse - Apple is losing its "cool factor".

And look at the thread on Forbes around If Steve Jobs Were Alive, He Would Fire Tim Cook. (Read the associated threads as well, such as one which argued that it would be "un-Buddhist" to fire Cook.)
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Yep, Apple is doomed.
 
liavman said:
Around the 20th minute Steve Jobs wonders, talking about reading an Aristotle book, if we could ask 'What would Aristotle have said for a particular problem'. He was referring to what a computer program is at the most fundamental level, that it captures the underlying principles that host many thousand experiences.

Now everyone asks 'What would Steve Jobs have done?' for every little thing. I think he has institutionalized his thinking in Apple using many means and I think there is at least a chance that the senior management in Apple can get an approximate answer to that question. That is the legacy that hopefully Steve jobs had left behind.
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Unfortunately, I don't see that happening so far. Tim is a typical management guy. Jobs' thinking was not constrained by ivory tower thinking. Guys like him are stunted by academics. Apple will always be a good company, but, I think its days of being an industry leader are behind it.
 
the only problem is that other computer scientists were surely talking about this well before 1983. There are PARC projects that had ideas like this in the 70's. You don't think Steve got wind of everyone's ideas in the tech industry? Just because he is talking about something doesn't mean he thought of it, or "envisioned" it.
 
renai-spirit said:
Yep, Apple is doomed.
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Not "doomed", but quite likely its days as a high-flying stock are numbered. If you have a significant investment in Apple stock, look at cashing in and diversifying before it might crash.

Seriously - if the teens and twenty-somethings decide that "Apple isn't cool", your investment goes down the crapper.

(...and "sue happy" Cook isn't bolstering the "cool factor" - quite the opposite.)
 
kdarling said:
Everybody and their brother had a vision of a computer in a book back then...

Mostly because of Alan Kay and his Dynabook concept from 1968:

YouTube: video
Click to expand...
For a second I thought this was video footage from 1968 with the guy having a modern laptop on the table near him and my mind was blown.
Then I realized that this was shot in the early 2000s.
Still very impressive to see that he was already envisioning modern laptop PCs back in 1968 at a time when microcomputers ("PCs") weren't yet available.
 
I envision teleportation... Where one can travel instantly from one place to another. When it becomes reality, remember I'm the visionary.
 
This isn't really news, all the comments about Alan Kay and Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke and Captain Picard are on the money, but, still, how this makes me miss the guy.
 
BKF said:
This isn't really news, all the comments about Alan Kay and Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke and Captain Picard are on the money, but, still, how this makes me miss the guy.
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Hey talk about this instead of maps.
 
faroZ06 said:
I'm pretty sure he's just pointing out that there's nothing special about Steve Jobs envisioning a tablet. This is just here because it's Steve Jobs, and it's not even news! This was known for a long time.
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I think the title should be:

"Steve Jobs Envisioned the iPad in 1983... and actually put it on the market 27 years later. Your move... science fiction authors..."
 
What's crazy is that when the iPad was announced 2 1/2 years ago a lot of people thought it would be a niche device that wouldn't become very popular. Now fast forward to now where tablets are everywhere and iPads have become common place not only in households but in businesses as well. I find it astounding how fast the iPad has been adopted.
 
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