I, along with many others, have written about the influence of Xerox PARC on Apple. The NeXT workstation was a great example of getting an approximation to the Smalltalk concept out using off-the-shelf parts, and Jobs often presaged iCloud with his discussion of NetInfo, NFS, and even the magneto-optical drive. He’d clearly been paying attention to PARC’s Ubiquitous Computing model. And of course the iPad with Siri is what you get if you marry the concept of the DynaBook with a desire to control the entire widget, not ceding that control to some sap who’s only claim to fame is that they bought the thing.
Sorry, they licensed the thing.
There are some good signs that Apple are still following the ubicomp playbook, and that’s encouraging because it will make a lot of their products better integrated, and more useful. Particularly, the Apple Watch is clearly the most “me” of any of my things (it’s strapped to my arm, while everything else is potentially on a desk in a different room, stuck to my wall, or in my pocket or bag) so it makes sense that that’s the thing I identify with to everything else. Unlocking a Mac with my watch is great, and using my watch to tell my TV that I’m the one plugging away at a fitness workout is similarly helpful.
To continue along this route, the bigger screen devices (the “boards”, “pads”, and “tabs” of ubicomp; the TVs, Macs, iPads, and iPhones of Apple’s parlance) need to give up their identities as “mine”. This is tricky for the iPhone, because it’s got an attachment to a phone number and billing account that is certainly someone’s, but in general the idea should be that my watch tells a nearby screen that it’s me using it, and that it should have access to my documents and storage. And, by extension, not to somebody else’s.
A scene. A company is giving a presentation, with a small number of people in the room and more dialled in over FaceTime (work with me, here). It’s time for the CTO to present the architecture, so she uses the Keynote app on her watch to request control of the Apple TV on the wall. It offers a list of her presentations in iCloud, she picks the relevant one by scrolling the digital crown, and now has a slide remote on her wrist, and her slides on the screen.
This works well if the Apple TV isn’t “logged in” to an iCloud account or Apple ID, but instead “borrows” access from the watch. Because the watch is on my wrist, so it’s the thing that is most definably “mine”, unlike the Apple TV and the FaceTime call which are “my employer’s”.
