/ Lisa Katayama / 1:00 pm Fri Jul 16, 2010

Wired forecast the iPad's existence in 1999

130373688.jpg It appears that Wired Magazine predicted that Apple would create "a wireless handheld dubbed the iPad" in its April, 1999 issue.

via @betsymason

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  1. Apple’s turnaround was heartwarming. I hope Job’s control fetish doesn’t turn them around yet again.

    1. No, Apple’s late-90’s turnaround was pathetic. It was based on hordes of know-nothings buying iMacs because they loved the blue plastic panel.

      1. Yes, because the money those “know-nothings” spent didn’t really count. The turnaround was all an illusion, folks. Don’t be fooled.

      2. Yeah, that’s a believable opinion.

        They had a compelling product following a string of uncompelling products. Your personal biases against some mythological homogeneous consumer base of their product is nothing more than projection.

      3. No, Apple’s late-90’s turnaround was pathetic. It was based on hordes of know-nothings buying iMacs because they loved the blue plastic panel.

        [cow sees your troll and raises]

        I thought the know-nothings bought the internetMac because of the awesomelicious round mouse?

      4. “No, Apple’s late-90’s turnaround was pathetic. It was based on hordes of know-nothings buying iMacs because they loved the blue plastic panel.”

        All computer companies had a horde of know-nothings buying crap because of their case. Anyone who bought computers during that time should know this.

      6. Compared to the know-nothings who buy them now for the shiny white or aluminum exterior and the (false) idea that they will have ‘better graphics’ and ‘less viruses’?

  2. Wow. This is an unusually prescient bit of prediction. I’d love to know who (among the back end editors) gets the main credit for this one.

  4. Not only that – portals!

    “Thank you for reading this brochure from the Aperture Science Temporally Agnostic Journalism Facility.”

  5. “The inescapable Portal has spawned a buzzword…”

    This one was actually on the mark, too.

    1. Actually, the “12 months” I believe refers to how long the “hype” of the Apple turnaround will last. Not when everything they stated would happen.

    1. Amazing, farsighted article by Zappa, futuremonkey. It made far too much sense for record company execs, though. They stuck with the tried-and-true until they finally went bankrupt, and musicians made their music directly available to fans for a reasonable rate. The ultimate statement was made when riaa.org was sold to a porn company.

      Just being a bit farsighted myself ;-)

  10. I know that they’ve been working on the project that became the ipad since at least 2003, when my friend at apple referred to the secret touch screen tablet project he was involved with. 4 years later when i asked him about the iphone, he said they had downsized the project to cell phone format for more marketability, but were still working on the tablet. I feel I’m not breaking confidence by sharing this after the ipad launch, and we’re discussing history.

  11. Actually this know-nothing was in love with the red plastic panels (Oh, Ruby iMac, you’ll forever be in my heart).

  12. Note the quote about the “aging operating system” (OS 9). OS X certainly turned that around.

  14. I think this falls under the category that even a broken watch is right twice a day.

    Sure they predicted the iPad but they also pushed the CueCat and swallowed the buzzword kool-aid.

    Sometimes I miss the hype and the ignorantly innocenct blissful bubble gum and happiness predictions.

  15. And they also got the diversification of Apple’s product line.

    I wonder about the phrasing — “the next iMac attack promises […] a wireless handheld dubbed the iPad.” Keep in mind that this was a year and a half before the unveiling of the original iPod. Was this based on internal Apple rumors? Has Jobs been working towards the iPad for that long?

    Alternatively, the Wired author could have just been indulging in wishful thinking about the perennial “Apple PDA” rumors, and gotten lucky by extrapolating off the “iMac” name.

    1. Has Jobs been working towards the iPad for that long?

      Perhaps not that long, but it’s known that the iPhone was actually a spinoff from the iPad project, which had been in the works for longer.

  16. I’m guessing Steve Jobs is a futurist and is good at determining the optimal time to release a new product. Kurzweil talks a lot about his own success being based on knowing when a particular bit of technology will be profitable.

    Or maybe, Steve isn’t so good at predicting. Remember the Apple Newton? He might just have enough capital to fund second chances.

    1. The Newton was during Jobs’s years in the wilderness, I think. No, the product to blame SJ for is the Cube.

      I’ve always thought the *name* iPad was a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’d heard it enough times in the years of speculation that it just seemed like a fait accompli when it happened.

      Oh, and I’m using one to write this posting (“You’re soaking in it!”) I’ve wanted something like this for twenty years…

  17. I think Apple got very lucky in the late nineties. The Newton (at least with the MP 2000/2100) was wonderful software with lacklustre hardware. The eMate proved this – the hardware was one tenth as powerful as it needed to be.the momentum

    This demonstrates Apple from 1994 – 1998. Sales carried the momentum which was quickly approaching maximum entropy.

    Apple was floundering with Taligent and Copland – no body really understood what they were or why they were needed. And no-one really knew what the PowerPC G3 was or why it was important.

    Jobs returned with hard lessons he’d learned from the industry (with nExt), an adaptable but immature OS (nExtStep) and a streamlined vision.

    six months either side, and I think Apple Computer would be a notable sidewalk in computer history.

    1. “Sales carried the momentum which was quickly approaching maximum entropy.”

      I have no idea what that means but I just won buzzword bingo with a triple word score.

  18. Obviously Steve Jobs just stole the idea from Wired. It’s not hard to imagine he read trade magazines back then, particularly the bits that pertain to his company.

  19. By the time I got the money together and decided that I preferred the purple plastic panels over the green, iBooks had been switched over to the white rectangle format.

    This is still one of my greatest disappointments.

    I still keep hoping they’ll see fit to bring back the multi-colored toilet seat design for a MacBook.

  20. Don’t you be talking bad about the cube, that’s still my favorite Apple design, followed closely by the dome/swivel screen imac.

  22. The real spiritual ancestor of the iPad was Alan Kay’s DynaBook concept, which dates back to 1968. (Kay was an Apple Fellow for a while.) Of course, the technology to make that sort of thing wasn’t commercially available then, nor was it really there when the Newton rolled out; Newton was really John Sculley’s gambit to leave his own imprint on Apple with something that (he hoped) would have the impact of an Apple II or a Macintosh. We know how well that worked out.

    And as far as Wired’s ability at prediction goes, all you have to do is look as far as their infamous “Pray” issue (lots of people giving suggestions for how to fix Apple, few if any touching on the idea of bringing Steve Jobs back), or for that matter the “Long Boom” issue that in effect said that the dot-com bubble would never burst.

  23. Who stole whose idea? But no doubt, Steven Job is one of the best persons who know how to guide the market and consumers.

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