On @photomatt’s “What’s Next for Apple”

Matt Mullenweg wrote a great post on what he expects from Apple in the near future. I had been meaning to write a similar post, but he beat me to it, so, I figured I would just piggyback on his post and add my two cents to each of his points.

1. Maps - Apple acquired Placebase in July 2009. I am guessing Apple signed something like a 5-year contract with Google for maps in 2007 and/or hasn’t felt the re-branded Placebase maps product to be good enough yet. But I do think maps and location are going to be a big push for iOS 6. You can already see hints with the geo-fenced reminders and friend locator in iOS 5.
2. iCloud - Dropbox will be fine; people are always saying Apple or Google will kill them.
3. Payments - Apple’s sitting on enough cash to start an ING-style checking account and debit card division. Totally pie in the sky, but wouldn’t surprise me. The more realistic scenario would be to launch a simple, hassle-free branded credit card, pre-loaded on all iOS devices.
4. TVs - I 100% believe Apple will launch a TV in the next 2-3 years. This $3.9 billion sourcing deal last March was supposedly for TV-sized LCD panels.
5. Search - I think Facebook is more likely to jump into head-on search competition with Google, but I bet Apple will continue to add non-Google ‘data services’ to Siri. Every search done through Yelp or Wikipedia will hurt Google. (Also: welcome to the Semantic Web.)
6. Cars - My hunch is that once Siri is open to third-party developers, the forward-looking car manufacturers (the first being BMW - and not just because of the famous Steve Jobs quote), will begin to have it/her power the car’s controls and UI. Nice knowing you, Microsoft Sync.

I also think the merger of OS X and iOS in the next couple of years, coupled with the launch of a touch-enabled iMac, is going to change the way workplace desktop computing is done.

MG made a good point last night about Apple and its awkward use of iTunes account emails to connect people for iMessage and FaceTime.

Apple should scrap Ping and launch an Apple iTunes/device-centric social network. Use mutual Twitter follows to ramp it up. It would makes iMessage, FaceTime, and even photo sharing (and tagging) via iPhoto easy to use. Incorporate Spotify-like sharing for music, movies and TV, with the interactivity of Turntable.fm, e.g., social distributed TV watching (which would work great on a dedicated Apple television).