Photoshop contests were once the province of lone gunmen, producing mock-ups and fake shots of new devices, and then e-mailing them out to everyone they know and posting them on Fark. But in a (possibly desperate) attempt to dredge up some new hits, Business 2.0 ran a feature in late March called “What’s Next For Apple?”.

It was a Mac Photoshopper’s dream, with all kinds of crazy, nonsensical devices showing in their photo essay. Everything you have ever heard on bulletin boards or crazy analysts—the iPhone, the Mac media center, the WiFi iPod—is back up for revisiting, including all sorts of other hokey things. An iPod watch? Come now. You have to be joking. You’re not? What? And you quote Rob Enderle with a straight face? Fie, fie!

I was very impressed with the artistry of the devices, though I have to admit, I was underwhelmed by their conceptions.

Apparently spring is the time for Apple to be reborn. Business 2.0 is hardly the only publication to be engaging in such a festival, what with Microsoft finally releasing details about Longhorn, and Tiger shipping, and a certain measure of Zeitgeist, everyone is looking forward to the devices of the distant future, and much of their hopes are pinned on Stevie J.

Maybe it’s because the iPod phone looks more and more elusive all the time. (No, not this one. What a fantastic joke, though.) Motorola says the carriers don’t want the phone because it’ll interfere with their ability to sell songs to people, just to play on their phones, for $3 each. Nevertheless, Moto is soldiering on, maybe playing chicken with Cingular and Verizon—but maybe they’ll sell it on their own, Engadget wonders.

And don’t forget the Unix intelligentsia getting on board with the Mac, Paul Graham says. He thinks the hacker market is influential far beyond its numbers, in that Richard Florida “creative class” sort of way. People like Jonathan Rentzsch (interviewed at DrunkenBlog recently), Nicholas Jitkoff, David Watanabe, and, well, Paul Graham. Why? “If you want to know what ordinary people will be doing with computers in ten years, just walk around the CS department at a good university. Whatever they’re doing, you’ll be doing,” he writes. And, he adds, they’re all using Macs now.

Never to be left out in any Mac-related writing, John Gruber, who is a Paul Graham of a very different niche, disagrees to a certain degree. Of course. He insists that in the GUI world, the Mac has always been the CBGB of the computing universe (my words, not his), and that “[t]he core difference between Mac OS X and the old Mac OS…[is] that it is good in (mostly) all the ways the old Mac OS was good, and but is also good in entirely different ways. It is the Mac and it is Unix…” (As a somewhat mystifying tangent, Tim Bray suggests he might switch back, even though he himself wrote that OS X is the best laptop Unix there is, three years ago. John Gruber deserves credit for catching the inconsistency, not me.)

An empirical look at just how outsized an influence the Mac intelligentsia have would be nice, too. And this month we have one, using NetNewsWire—apparently the biggest desktop aggregator and an OS X-only product—as its benchmark. Bray runs through his RSS-feed client numbers, and discovers that 22.9 percent (187,000) of his readers use NetNewsWire, with the silver; Richard McManus at Read/Write Web also finds it in second place, with 7 percent; FeedBurner says it’s second with 16.95 percent; and 17.9 percent at 37signals. Not too shabby, for 3 percent of the computer market. I am not the only person who thinks this ties into Paul Graham’s Law, that hackers are necessarily ten years ahead and right now they’re using Macs; McManus agrees with me, or rather, I with him.

Given this new influx of the computing world’s intelligentsia, Macworld wants to look ahead. “What comes after Tiger?” they ask. The answer is, well, maybe a lot, and maybe not all that much. Would you like “smart locations,” with GPS receivers, or the return of the thin-client model as “Profile”? And maybe, finally, Home-on-iPod? Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow, don’t stop, it’ll soon be here…

Copyright © 2005 Wes Meltzer, wmeltzer@atpm.com.