Steve Jobs was truly one-of-kind. The co-founder of Apple was a visionary who helped change the way we work, play, and live. And Jobs made some predictions in the 1980s and 1990s that may have seemed far-fetched at the time, but it turns out he absolutely nailed it.
Here are some examples of the foresight that Jobs had years before these things became a reality.
Tablets
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The iPad wasn’t launched by Apple until 2010, but all the way back in 1983 at the International Design Conference in Aspen, Jobs talked about “an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you that you that you can learn in five minutes.”
Virtual Assistants
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Before Siri and Alexa became household items, Jobs said this…in 1984: “The next stage is going to be computers as ‘agents. In other words, it will be as if there’s a little person inside that box who starts to anticipate what you want. Rather than help you, it will start to guide you through large amounts of information. It will almost be like you have a little friend inside that box.”
Sound familiar?
iPhones
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Those “agents” Jobs talked about? Jobs said they would evolve. “I’ve always thought it would be really wonderful to have a little box, a sort of slate that you could carry along with you.”
Sounds like an iPhone to me.
Young people and devices
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Jobs really nailed this prediction. In 1984, he said, “You’d get one of these things maybe when you were 10 years old, and somehow you’d turn it on and it would say, you know, ‘Where am I?’ And you’d somehow tell it you were in California and it would say, ‘Oh, who are you?'”
The online marketplace
Photo Credit: Flickr,Elaine Smith
In 1995, Steve Jobs predicted that the newly-flourishing Internet would allow startup companies to compete with established companies because they’d be able to sell directly to consumers. He said, “it’s very exciting because it is going to destroy vast layers of our economy and make available a presence in the marketplace for very small companies, one that is equal to very large companies.”
Sadly, Jobs passed away in 2011 at the age of 56 from pancreatic cancer, but he sure did accomplish a lot while he was alive.
