(So what did you think -- that it's my real name?)
APPLE HAS BEEN MAKING AND SELLING monitors for years now. In fact
the original Mac came with a monitor built in.
But that one was tiny. You had to print out
your documents to see what they really looked like.
It's not much different today. Even if you have a 21-inch monitor
(and my wife does have one, so I know), it's hard to simultaneously
see and read the whole page, especially if it's formatted for
legal size paper (and my wife is a lawyer, so I know that too).
It gets even worse if you're heavily into page layout
or artwork, like I am. You can either see the whole page but
not read it, or view the whole picture but not see its details;
or else you can read what you've written or examine what you've
drawn, but can't see it in its full context. But you can't
do both. For architects (and a friend of mine is one), it
gets even worse, since their pages are huge. In many cases,
the only way to examine their handiwork is to print it out
in full colour, and that gets real expensive and time-consuming.
Now ain't that a shame? Why, in
that case, did we get rid of our drafting tables?
Seeing as how Macs are used for graphic-intensive work far
more than PCs, and even if they're used only for word processing
they still can't show the whole page in a way it can be read,
I think Apple should take this problem real seriously.
Well, you know what they say: for those who are smart
there aren't any problems, there're only challenges. And Apple,
being smart, should take this challenge to heart in a way only
Apple can: by Thinking Differently.
Mind you, you can already hook up multiple
monitors to your Mac, which is more than you can say for most
PCs. That helps; but it's hardly enough. It expands
your horizons, side-to-side; but not your up-and-down views.
And even though flat panel displays are getting much more readily
available, and even affordable, the really big ones are still
out of most people's reach. The Big Boys -- Fortune 500 companies
-- can afford them, maybe: but for the "rest of us", what Apple
should do is offer an expandable flat panel display.
Let's look at the economics of the idea. The 15-inch
Apple flat panel display, capable of showing 1024 x 768 pixels,
retails for $1100 (as of this month: March 1999). That comes
to 786,432 pixels, or around 715 pixels to the dollar. At
that price, about 400 bucks buys you 307,200 pixels, which
can be arranged in a 640 x 480 pattern. With time, of course,
these prices would be expected to fall: in fact by the time
the millennium rolls round we could maybe get the price down
to, say, $200 or so.
Now let's say Apple sold these 640 x 480 flat panels which could
be arranged right next to each other: to the side, above or
below. They could sell you a fairly large board, say, about
4 feet wide by 2 feet 3 inches high, or even bigger (with
a 16x9 ratio, like HDTV)-- which you could even hang on
the wall if you wanted to -- and onto which these flat panels
could be snapped in whichever location you wanted. The board
would be the only thing connected to the CPU: the panels would
snap into little electrical thingies on the board. You could
have as many panels as you liked on the board, the limit being
determined only by the size of the board. Every time you snapped
an additional panel on, it would display the image a little
larger in the direction of where this panel was located compared
to the already-existing panels. All automatically, with the
aid of software built into the next generation of the Mac OS.
So picture this. Come Christmas 1999 you buy yourself
a brand new 500 MHz G3 running OS-X with, say, six of these
6.5 x 5 inch flat panels -- which is all you can afford right
then -- along of course with their 4 x 2.25 ft. board. You
put your desk up against the wall, the G3 under the desk,
the keyboard and mouse on the desk, and the board for the
flat panels -- which comes with built-in speakers, of course
-- on the wall behind the desk.
Now you are free to arrange the 640 x 480 pixel flat
panels whichever way you want on the board.
If, like my wife, you're a lawyer and heavily into word processing,
say, you might want to arrange them two across and three down,
with their long sides in the vertical position. So your viewing
area becomes 1920 pixels tall by 960 pixels wide -- or in inches,
19.5 x 10 in. -- which is perfect for viewing the whole legal
size page, and then some.
On the other hand,
if you are into landscapes, you arrange your panels sideways,
so you get a viewing area 19.5 inches wide by 10 inches tall.
Perfect for touching up those great shots of the Grand Canyon
in Photoshop.
Then you realise you don't have a place to put all those
pesky palettes which come with Photoshop. No big deal,
you go out at Easter of the year 2000 -- by now having already
paid off those credit cards you maxed-out at X-Mas -- and buy
a seventh one of these flat panels, which have gone down in
price.So now you've got a place to put all those palettes
and see the Big Picture, uninterrupted and palette-free.
At your birthday in July, you ask you wife for (and
hopefully get) a couple more of these flat panels, which by
then are even less expensive. Now you've got ten: arrange
them 3x3, with the tenth one to one side for the palettes
or toolbars, and you can see an even Bigger Picture.
By Christmas of the year 2002, of course, the prices for flat
panels are so low you can afford to splurge, and you go out
and buy yourself eight more, along with the latest 2,002 MHz
G5 machine. This Mac lets you play games so realistic you wouldn't
believe. But to really get the proper effect, you need a really
wide screen. So you arrange your eighteen panels 6x3, long sides
vertical, to get a viewing area 30 inches wide by 15 inches
down -- almost 34 inches diagonal -- with a resolution of 2880
x 1920: which anyone alive today would kill for.
When the G10 machines, running at 100 GigaHertz,
roll round in the year 2007 or so (and with Moore's Law at
its present stage of acceleration, that seems entirely possible),
you'd have enough money to put up a whole damn wall of flat
panels, on which you could view full motion video at resolutions
matching today's Omnimax films: and that too, in 3-D. But
of course, by that time even flat panels might have given
way to electrodes planted right in your skull, allowing you
to see what's on the computer without any monitor at all ...
But never mind all that. What's important is to realise
that PCs couldn't do anything like this! Windows --
even NT -- doesn't easily allow multiple monitors to be hooked
up. And with Plug and Pray, one wonders if they even have a
prayer of getting there. Play big-screen games on your G3 or
G4 Mac, and you'd be the envy of your PC-loving friends!
Heck, I think even Bill Gates would buy one, just to play
games. Wouldn't you?
... (not his real name -- but you figured that out already,
right?) ... calls himself a "Thinker", especially about the
future. He thinks that's where he'll be spending the rest
of his life (but who's he kidding, eh? Doesn't he realize
it's always going to be now?)
Most people say to him "You can't be serious" -- and they're
right, he can't. (But then, who can be serious about
the future, seeing as how anything can happen in it, and usually
does ... er, will?)
His best book -- indeed his only book -- is entitled The
Seventh Generation, and its shareware version in Adobe
Acrobat format is available for download from his alter-ego's
web site (under construction right now) at http://cpu2308.adsl.bellglobal.com.
It's all about the next 150 years or so, and where technology
might take us in that amount of time. (Just $5.00 -- cheap!
And well worth it, though he says so himself). Check it out.
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