When iPhones fly? Don't put it past Apple

You can have your bigger screens and better battery life -- Apple is too busy taking future iPhones to the skies

Last week, I was feverishly working on a post exploring the relation between success as a software engineer and mammary size, inspired by Barbie’s recent message to today's youth. It appears I’ve missed my window, though it generated fabulous links. The delay was unavoidable; long story short, my home office furniture and my new, dangerously obese 25-pound tuxedo cat arrived at the same time. Adopted from a French guy, I originally planned to call him Wine Sucking Surrender Gremlin, but that’s too many syllables after my nightly bucket o' scotch -- instead, meet Maginot.

All this change required serious liquor-lubricated therapy, and my amazing Barbie bash fell too far behind the Internet clickbait curve. It will now never see the light of day -- unless Mattel writes a sequel where Barbie teaches little girls how to become successful network technicians using their bosoms to manipulate colleagues into doing all the thankless wiring work.

What does that leave us? Merely a shining distress beacon blinking alarmingly from the U.S. Patent Office. It seems the garden gnomes at the USPOhmyGod have granted Apple a patent on a future iPhone that’ll be a Cupertino crossbreed of the Turing test and a flying squirrel. Apple believes it can eventually build a smartphone that's not only overrated, but can also glide itself to safety in case -- for example -- a besotted snarkmeister drops it while bar-dialing his ex.

Permission to land

Apple engineers believe the same motor that allows the iCurse to vibrate can be used to reorient the phone while it’s falling, so it’ll land the right way up and preserve whatever HD touchscreen will be in vogue in the year 2072. Alternatively, it might automatically eject its fragile battery and fall in a self-preserving orientation. They also think they can get the iDunce to sprout “air foils” when it decides it’s in freefall, gliding it to someplace safe and soft like a shag carpet or a baby’s face.

Even better, Apple might opt to allow the phone to clamp down on its headphone port, so it could use the wire as a climbing rope to haul itself to safety. I want to see that. Bezos’ 30-minute-or-less drone delivery system seems downright antique by comparison.

I asked Maginot what he thought of these developments, then hit myself in the groin because I was talking to a cat. I refuse to become that guy. When I stopped crying, I laboriously turned on optimistic, open-minded mode and realized that weirder things have happened. NetWare lost a marketing war to Microsoft with 63 percent market share. Eddie Snowden proved it’s 1984, but the home of the free doesn’t care. Travis Kalanick got a Christmas card ... from the BTK killer, but still. Why not a flying, mountain-climbing iPhone?

Better living through technology

Imagine the possibilities. Combine the technology with biologically safe nanobots and you could brew coffee that automatically spills in the direction of your paper towels … or your ex's lap. Lug nuts could roll toward you when you’re changing a tire in a sleet storm instead of always, always under the car. Don’t get me started on the “personal massager” business.

Apple, I love this. Sure, it’s crazier than when Larry Ellison tried to have himself surgically attached to a Clydesdale, so he could become a minotaur, but it’s gutsy in a raucously demented way. If anyone has a right to be technologically arrogant, it’s the company that brought us Copland, the Apple Mouse, and the Newton. Avoid hiring Barbie fans as R&D engineers and you’ll deliver us flying monkey phones in a few short decades. Occupo rabidus.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com