The Real iPhone Revolution - iPhone in OS X

On the brink of Apple releasing its quarterly earnings today and the long awaited OS X Leopard on Friday, the New York Times has an article today on the increase in Mac marketshare. The article quotes Steve Jobs as saying that Mac users should expect an OS upgrade every 12 to 18 months (which is consistant with Apple's past OS X practice and, probably not too bad to Apple's bottom line at $129 a pop).

But, the real news burried at the bottom of the article is this comment by Jobs:

Mr. Jobs said he was struck by the success of the multitouch interface that is at the heart of the iPhone version of the OS X. This allows a user to touch the screen at more than one point to zoom in on a portion of a photo, for example.“People don’t understand that we’ve invented a new class of interface,” he said.He contrasted it with stylus interfaces, like the approach Microsoft took with its tablet computer. That interface is not so different from what most computers have been using since the mid-1980s.In contrast, Mr. Jobs said that multitouch drastically simplified the process of controlling a computer.There are no “verbs” in the iPhone interface, he said, alluding to the way a standard mouse or stylus system works. In those systems, users select an object, like a photo, and then separately select an action, or “verb,” to do something to it.The Apple development team worried constantly that the approach might fail during the years they were creating the iPhone, he said.“We all had that Garry Trudeau cartoon that poked fun at the Newton in the back of our minds,” he said, citing Doonesbury comic strips that mocked an Apple handwriting-recognition system in 1993. “This thing had to work.” 

Why is this so important? Everyone and their brother has assumed that the iPhone interface would eventually make its way to the iPod and, of course, it did. But, I suspect Apple is thinking beyond the iPod product line. There has been spectualtion here and there that Apple would port the touch interface to MacBook laptops (most likely via a touch trackpad) as well as some speculation that Apple's desktops could use a touch interface (which Jobs has rightly rejected as unworkable in the current form factor - try holding your arm up to your monitor for 5 minutes). But Jobs explaination should give you and idea to the furture of the Mac OS X interface - "verbs" v "nouns."

I suspect that over the next 2 years we are going to see more "noun" type interfaces from Apple in OS X, with or without a touch input mechanism. More "one click" or "one touch" standalone widgets that do one thing only. Don't forget that the iPhone was in development for years at Apple and its "culture" is most likely entrenched at the stakeholder level of Apple. Thus, I suspect that there will be more "iPhone in OS X" over the next couple of years rather than more "OS X in the iPhone."

Want some evidence? How about Widgets? Or Coverflow (now there's an interface that works amazingly well on the iPhone and is good, yet not as good, in iTunes. And, of course, OS X Leopard will have coverflow everywhere). Or how about iMovie 08 (which amazingly lost features from its previous version)? I submit that all of these Apple "innovations" were born out of, or refined by, the iPhone interface work.