Milking the iPhone
The next step is, in my humble opinion, obvious but not trivial in execution. It is also a perfect &quot;Innovators Dilemma&quot; scenario.<p>The next iPhone needs to be a Mac computer in your pocket and have the full functionality of a Mac.<p>One thing that is painfully missing from iOS is multiuser support.<p>It is unbelievable that, so many years later, I can&#x27;t hand my iPhone or iPad to a friend, co-worker, my kids or someone at a meeting and have them be in &quot;guest&quot; mode or some mode where I can exercise complete access control to information and apps.  Today, if you hand your unlocked iOS device to someone they have full access to anything that isn&#x27;t locked out specifically by an app.  And, even at that, your entire device is exposed.<p>The other improvement would be more granularity in selecting what lives outside and inside the lock screen.  I work in an ITAR environment, which means my phone needs to have a password in order to prevent access to my ITAR email and calendar. NOTHING ELSE ON MY PHONE requires that lockout. I can&#x27;t even hang-up the damn thing while on a call without entering a password because the damn lock screen locks out everything.  This is ridiculous.<p>If I had the aforementioned multi-user mode I could setup a &quot;work&quot; user to deal with my ITAR stuff and a &quot;me&quot; user to expose what I want and how I want it.<p>There is no good reason I can come up with to have my friggin calculator live behind a password.  I should be able to define what I want on each side of that wall.<p>Finally, and this would be the killer app, the new your-iphone-is-a-mac device should have the technology necessary to bring up the MacOS interface on any computer any time.  In other words, when I go to work, I should be able to connect to my Mac-in-my-pocket device and bring-up MacOS on a window on my Windows 10 machine.<p>It should be painless and seamless.  If it requires a little USB device, that&#x27;s fine. The phone should have a slot for this device to be stored so it can go with you anywhere. Pop it out, plug it in and you are in business.  This should also work on traditional Macs.<p>Now your phone is your real personal computer, everywhere.<p>It could even use the touchscreen as the trackpad if necessary.<p>The other huge evolutionary step if they took this path would be to allow full file system access.  Maybe there&#x27;s a distinction between MacOS and iOS apps.  The iOS stuff can remain sandboxed while the MacOS apps enjoy full file system access.<p>Finally, the phone&#x27;s physical UI needs to evolve. This business of overloading a precious few buttons is nonsense. Double click, triple click, the volume button is this and that...etc.  Insane. Most people have no clue because most people don&#x27;t operate that way. What the iPhone desperately needs is something like an edge mounted wheel or, even better, a two dimensional sensor (like the mice that image an amplified version of the table to determine how far you moved, only this one would image your thumb).<p>Something like scrolling through your address book or apps could be a single handed, single finger operation.  Many years ago I had a Motorola flip phone with a piggy back accessory (forgot the name) that included a rotary wheel with a push-to-select function.  It was incredibly useful and fast.<p>The iPhone also needs a few buttons the user can define. I want a real edge-mounted button to, for example, launch my RPN calculator.  Maybe another button to launch the weather app, stocks or whatever. Physical buttons are good.<p>Now, I understand the minimalist design thing.  Fine.  Provide an unencumbered interface and protocol entrepreneurs can use to interface with the phone and build such add-on products.  By unencumbered I mean something like a simple high speed serial port with power, no licensing, no walled garden, no buying proprietary chips.  The range of innovation this would spur would be massive.<p>There&#x27;s a lot they can do with the device and form factor.  They need to get off this thinner, thinner, thinner bullshit.  I don&#x27;t want it thinner.  I&#x27;d gladly have a device twice as thick as the current crop of iphones if it did a good portion of what I described above. People don&#x27;t buy these things because they are thin.  I am still on an iPhone 4S because there&#x27;s nothing whatsoever in the new phones that is compelling or useful enough to spend the money on an upgrade.<p>If Apple doesn&#x27;t wake up they are going to find themselves up against new contenders that will eat them for lunch.  I still have hopes for a fully desktop integrated Windows phone.  Microsoft won&#x27;t do it but that doesn&#x27;t mean companies like HP won&#x27;t pull it off and knock it out of the park.  If someone shows-up with powerful fully integrated Windows PC in my pocket that can connect to the desktop (and more) I am launching this 4S into orbit and switching.  I want Solidworks in my pocket and usable anywhere I go.  I want computing that isn&#x27;t tied to and locked to my desk.  I want to own my data and not have it exposed on someone&#x27;s cloud.<p>I want the next evolutionary step in computing.  It&#x27;s about time.  Who&#x27;s going to do it?