I’m sure what I’m going to say has been said before, I intimated it the other day for that matter, but Steven Jobs left Apple with an iMpire (i Empire)  that no one has been able to keep up with.  One way of seeing his legacy, the way he and others may have seen it was as the tools required to interact with the world of data.

Our world (in the metaphysical sense) started out as a place of brute  physicality.  As society developed and technology humans began to plan, and then we began to record information remote from our brains, and then ideas and concepts, some of them completely disassociated from the physical world we lived in.  Some people began to ‘live in their head’ could do so without getting eaten or starving because society could afford to support them, and even awarded them for some of the things they could bring forth (art, science, technology in the abstract.)

This evolution has continued to the point where a large part of our world has become intellectual, it is now a world of data that can only be accessed with the right tools.  But this world is not a static one where you just look in and pull out what you want, there is a vast amount of creation and manipulation required.  But this requires a set of tools that provide mirror simple access to the world of data.  Mirror simple, because all you need to do with a mirror is hanging it up and look into it and it does its job.  If technology requires you to carry out arcane incantations and hand motions to provide access to the data world then its to some extent impeding you.

Look at it another way, there is ongoing work in the DoD that eventually will allow a pilot to look around and see the world outside the cockpit as if the aircraft were not there.  We need the inverse, the ability to peer into the data world and do what we need, from any point at any time, for an uncountable multitude of reasons…

• On the Go Data Access + Comms
• iPad (Fire hose of access, lite content creator, iPhone in chief?)
• iPhone
• iPod, Touch (can we see this as the low end iPhone) Nano (does this eventually become the iPhone Nano, the iWatch….which it already is, almost)
• The Links
• Commercial Front End
• ITunes
• AppStore
• The Linking memory
• iCloud
• Content Creation
• Mac
• Mac Mini (beginner)
• MacBooks
• AirBook (on the go content creation, iPad with keyboard)
• Home Data Center, access heavy, creation light
• Apple TV
• Mac Mini
• iPad

 So Apple as a complete iCology now; the problem is that we really need the rest of the tech world to catch up.