By Greg Mills
Guessing what Apple will do, is of course, an inexact science, as they enjoy making monkeys out of tech writers. It has been said that most of the time the weather today is a pretty good indicator for what the weather will be like tomorrow. That cliche is obviously wrong a lot, but odds are that similar weather comes on consecutive days more often than not.
We can see broad trends where things happen predictably across the entire spectrum of Apple products. The touch and gesture interface has spread to both touch pads on computers and touch screens on all Apple devices. We can certainly predict that Siri will show up next on iPad 3 and even the Mac platform sooner or later. Speech recognition has made tremendous strides in the last few years.
Apple has publicly absorbed Siri technology and merged it, I suspect, with Nuance speech technology. I did a product review a few months ago on Nuance Speech recognition software for the Mac and figured at the time that something big was in the works related to Apple and Nuance speech recognition. No one at Nuance could discuss it with me, but if there is a new or improved interface between computers and people, Apple is all over it. Speech control of computers is certainly hitting the big time in the form of Siri, right now.
The iPhone 4S and iOS 5 has only been released a few days and already Siri has been hacked to sort of run on iPhone 4. It turns out the dual A5 chipset makes Siri snappy but previous iPhone might just run Siri, how be it a bit slower. Apple is notoriously finicky about things working flawlessly, and while that is one technical reason Apple servers won’t easily allow anything less than an iPhone 4S to run Siri, there is an additional reason for Apple to block previous iPhones. Marketing, they want to sell iPhone 4Ses, and they sure are.
Will Siri sell iPhones? “Flying off the shelf” is virtually defined by iPhone releases and iPhone 4S appears to have set records all around. Tuesday Apple will release data on the quarter and I am sure some amazing sales records will be announced. Will Siri help sell theiPad 3? Are you kidding?
One thing I predicted a while back, was that Apple would release a drag and drop, easy app builder and that a sandbox for running iOS Apps on Mac was coming soon. Both of these concepts make sense. Running iOS apps on Macs would open a new market for apps. Launching an app builder program for the Mac would allow people to play with building iOS apps and create a whole new catagory of simple apps.
That is Greg’s BIte.