article [paid sub. required] on Apple’s possible plans for the future, Paul Sloan speculates that the company will continue its dominance in the digital media and consumer electronics businesses with a lineup of iPod-based products. The magazine has also posted renderings of these possible products, which include “PodWatch,” “iPod Wireless,” “vPod,” “iHome” and “iPhone.” The mock-ups were created by Robert Brunner, Apple’s chief designer from 1989 to 1996.
In a seven-page Business 2.0“Discussions with past and present company officials, Apple partners, and longtime acquaintances of Jobs, as well as clues in patent applications and other evidence, point to a gargantuan effort to leverage the iPod’s success by creating an entire line of breakout consumer electronics devices,” Sloan writes. “Dozens of gadgets — from an iPod phone to wireless iPods that talk to one another to the ultimate all-in-one home-cum-car media hub — appear to be on the drawing board or, in some cases, already in prototype.”
Sloan says a wireless iPod could use Bluetooth to sync with your computer, or use Wi-Fi to connect to the iTunes Music Store from a public network. He also mentions that the device could morph into a “super iPod” that would “wirelessly communicate with a car, providing an iPod-like interface on the dashboard that handles not only music but also addresses, calendar information, and even a navigational system.” An iPod/mobile phone combination device could be controlled “with the iPod’s scroll wheel, and the numbers could work with a slide-out keyboard or a simple touchpad system on the screen,” Sloan says.
“For the first time in more than a decade, Apple has a chance to become a commercially powerful company — not just a very cool place with a superstar CEO and brilliant designers, but a leader in new markets that are exponentially bigger than the very computer industry it pioneered,” he says. “The sizzle is in what Apple comes up with to turbocharge the iPod — or to create entirely new devices so irresistible that, iPod-like, they’ll blast open vast new markets.”
Other interesting details in the article were the fact that the iPod is selling at a rate of about 40 per minute, and that Microsoft recently hired a former Apple design executive to help the software giant be more like Apple.