Q Manning, CEO of Rocksauce Studios | APPS | 08.07.2012 @ 5:00 pm
Earlier this week, it was officially revealed after years of speculation that Steve Jobs was, at one point, contemplating the creation of an Apple car. Amazing or ridiculous?
I’ve heard about the iCar before and I’ve always wondered how homogenous it would be. The way Apple works is that everything is the same across the board. There’s no differentiation in their line. Everything follows the same plan. The first version of the iCar would have been white with a black version following a year later and so forth. I’ve often wondered if Jobs’ plan was to make an aluminum, battery-powered car. I’m very curious to see what this car would have looked like. I wonder what kind of technological innovations Jobs would have insisted on. Would it have been a pioneer in hydrogen fuel cels? It would have been a unique fuel source with probably the most beautiful engine anyone can imagine. But then there are the questions.
How would you buy the iCar? Would you buy it off the Apple website or would you buy it at the Apple store? If it broke, would you have to bring it back to the Apple store? Would you have to get a Genius appointment to get your car fixed? Would Geniuses have to take a crash course in car repair? Those are the kind of things I wonder! It would’ve been a great looking product, but I’m more curious about what kind of support structure Apple would have implemented, especially since it’s against the law to order vehicles on the internet. That’s true! You have to go to a dealership! You have to buy a vehicle through a third party. You can thank lobbying laws from decades ago that prevented car manufacturers from selling directly to consumers for that.
Whenever we discuss apps, we tend to only think a year or two in the future. Let’s get science fiction: what would the iPhone look like in 2050?
in 2050, I don’t think we’ll have phones. I think that all of the science fiction mumbo jumbo that we’ve seen regarding cybernetic implants will be the most likely outcome. If there’s a phone at all, it’ll be implanted inside your body after a quick surgical appointment at your local Apple store! All of our technology will be integrated inside of ourselves. I know that sounds crazy to most people, but look at where Google is with the Google Goggles in 2012. The only direction to go from there, especially that far in the future, is biotech. It could be as simple as small ear implants and special contacts on our eyes that detect what you’re looking at!
However, I’m no expert futurecaster and I look at those who do it with awe. The things that we expect to become prolific are never the things that actually become prolific. If you look back at the 1950 and 1960s and examine what they were expecting us to be doing in 2012, it was never touchscreen phones, it was flying cars and cities in the sky! That’s what people were expecting. Robots! No one thought about smartphones. ‘Star Trek’ didn’t even envision them. It wasn’t until ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ that touchscreen devices became a thing!
Imagine getting a nanobot injection and letting the microscopic robots that live inside of you control your implanted technology. I think that’s where we’re going.
What is something that, in the future, you want solved with an app?
Registration for government services and voting. Anything to do with the government, actually. There’s a certain security boundary that I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to surpass (hackers!), but imagine being able to register and cast your vote the week of the election on your phone! You login with your thumbprint or a retina scan (or your nanorobot knows that it’s you!) and you cast your vote or access your medical records or anything. This is a problem that we truly need to fix.