Even then, they only did so by acquiring a use metaphor handed to them by Xerox PaRC.
They only reason Apple has survived this innovation drought is that no other computing company has don’e any more. Its is way way way past time for some actual innovation in computation. None of my apps know anything about any of my other apps. None of my documents know anything about any of my other documents. Nothing I do on my computer has any effect at all on anything anyone else is doing on their computer. My computer is optimized for sleep and inactivity. Apple sells its computers by bragging about how little they do, how long their batteries go between a charge. When I wake up each morning, my computer has down nothing all night. My files remain the same. No sharing of data has occurred. No collaboration has been initiated. My computer knows nothing of who I am, of the trajectory I am on, of what could be done to optimize any of this, of my goals, of the intersection of my trajectory and anyone else’s trajectory. There is no way to automatically integrate what I have done into the workflow’s of other users or their computers. There is no way to track ownership and direct payment and use. There is no scheme to optimize complexity. AI is a toy just as top down as computing has been for the last 80 years. All the while, computing attracts geeks and dweebs who can’t stop singing praises to these stale and incompetent companies who give us the same stupid but a bit faster stupid every year. Let’s put 10 no-nonsence geniuses into a room for a weekend with some pens and butcher paper and tell them to design the future of computation. Thats all it should take. Quantum computing isn’t the issue. Large language models isn’t the issue. Lets demand more of our computers and the corporation we buy them from.
What’s your favorite attempt to solve collaboration and interconnected docs (from any company?)
Someone remind me. Was it the ill fated Copeland Operating System that was supposed to enable applications to deliver a component of their technical ability to other apps? There was a name for it but searching for old stuff like this is difficult today.
It feels like Apple’s App Intents is another crack at this concept which is a massive undertaking and if AI can be the glue that makes it happen then i’ll be duly impressed because computing hasn’t set the world ablaze. With a straight face I’d say the most impactful technology of the last century could very well be Arpanet becoming our Wide Area Network. Our ability to interconnect into a vast fabric has been more influential than anything that Microsoft, Apple or any other extant vendor has been able to accomplish. They’ve become end points and at levels part of the backbone but it’s the Network that is King.
I agree.
To be fair, Apple is still a hardware company,. Its devices differ from Lenovo and Dell, etc. in their quality, not in the software that many businesses will choose to run on them.
The apps that Apple includes with their hardware are designed to make them useful for an average individual right out of the box. The current leaders in collaboration are Microsoft and Google. And that depends on conductivity.
Welcome to MPU @Randall_Lee_Reetz
Forty-two years ago I was a junior in college. My physics project was computer modeling of the surface enhanced Raman effect.
I used Fortran via punch cards on an IBM 3033 mainframe.
A guy down the hall, one of my still close friends, had a state of the art personal computer. An Apple II.
Yep, nothing has changed in 40 years.
The media we move around via sneaker net is a lot lighter now. A box of punch cards weighed around 14 pounds 
Vision Pro? 
20 characters
Microsoft had a couple of technologies that did this in the 1990’s. I remember one name “OLE” which stood for Object Linking and Embedding. You could drop an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document and when you clicked on a cell the menu bar would switch from one for Word to one for Excel. For all I know this still works.
Modern Apple computers aren’t optimized for sleep and inactivity - they’re optimized to do as much as they can with as little power usage as possible, which includes not doing anything when there’s nothing that you’ve asked them to do.
Old laptops weighed over 10 pounds, had tiny screens, and had miserable battery life even when running very lightweight word processing software. Modern laptops last all day doing much heavier computational work, at about 10% of the weight.
I remember being into fractal generation in high school. The only computers I had available that I could leave to run long enough were old Apple II models, and those could generate a 150-iteration rendering of Mandelbrot’s “seahorse valley” - at a whopping 280x192 pixels with 6 colors - in about 12 hours. The hardware in the worst current-production Apple Watch could do that in seconds, at higher resolution, with better color rendering.
What specifically do you want to do, and what have you tried?
My computer at night generates audio from text for me to listen to and automatically dumps it via RSS into my phone’s podcast player, automatically uploads and downloads other content from Internet-connected servers, and a number of other things. Anything I put into Dropbox can be shared with others such that they automatically get the updates on their computer, and can do whatever they want with it - including running software on their own side to parse, embed, etc.
It sounds like you want your computer to be thinking about how to help you, which means we need a solution to the “strong AI problem,” or “artificial general intelligence.” I can assure you, we have far more than 10 geniuses working on that. 
Thank you I had such a bad case of brain bit rot and couldn’t remember the word.
@tomalmy I remember OLE as well. I think Apple and MSFT were a bit over their skis back then. Ideologically it was next level stuff but our HW/SW stacks weren’t ready. In retrospect it may have been more of a biz model change that moved the goal posts to creating ecosystems with lock in that stagnated efforts like OpenDoc and OLE.
Hopefully we can move computer science beyond erecting walled gardens and back to interoperable communication. The outrageous fortune would seem to benefit the companies that can balance the complexity with a great user experience which has largely always been the case.
There was also Apple’s joint venture with IBM named Taligent that conceived the Pink environment.
I’m old and retired after beginning to use and program computers in high school but I have no idea what you are talking about. Apple? Not changed computing in the last 40 years?
You seem to have some experience with computers but to have noticed very little about them over the years. 
In your case, you don’t use a computer overnight. Apple certainly didn’t make machines that cannot do batch work! My Mac works every night training machine learning, and when I open it in the morning it has normally completed many tasks (and it still working) and it often has even sent notifications to people I’m working with that the jobs are complete and they can access the results using ssh.
So, Macs certainly can work 24/7 doing hard tasks (my Studio Ultra is normally at full capacity overnight!) and can automatically schedule things with cron, and share data.
Apple certainly didn’t design them to only work in the day.
This requires a massive paradigm shift in integrating data. But, we are moving in that direction. The only industry working in that field is advertising (integrating bits of user scraped data to sell us more stuff) - if only this power was used for good.
- Forty years ago I was not using light, fast machines that could bring up information at the touch of a button or click of a mouse
- I was not using. the Internet to find information
- I did not have a handy database of information at my finger tips to help me at work. (Devonthink)
- I was not dictating my thoughts and having them transcribed
- I was not using AI to transform speech or text into client handy information, manipulate data table etc … with just magical incantations (prompts)
- I was using maps, and getting a rush of excitement realizing I was lost and having no clue where I was.
- I was not using AI to converse with my data
- Even 1 year ago my search paradigm was trying to find the right set of words to search, now I tend to lead towards more sentences, and questions , while using ChatGPT on Perplexity
AI or something like it will likely be the glue that stitches the information together, like a massive Notebook LM.