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              Looking Back on Past April Fools Day TidBITS Issues

   Adam Engst

   For many years, we looked forward to April Fools Day. It was our excuse
   to write about things we'or our readers'wanted to come true, even when
   we knew they never would. (Those of you still hoping for [1]the return
   of Word 5.1 to macOS or [2]running natively on the iPad need to move
   on.) But our articles often went much deeper than tugging at our
   readers' hopes and fears. They also gave us an opportunity to imagine
   the future. And you know what? We did pretty well.

   Alas, the complete disregard for fact and truth in so much of today's
   public discourse has rendered April Fools Day jokes uncomfortably
   quaint. There's no enjoyment in exploring how you would react to the
   rug of reality being pulled out from under you one special day per year
   when so many social media megaphones loudly deny, in essence, that the
   world is round ([3]it is), along the way toward casting aspersions on
   numerous other things that are 'only' well-supported, if not proven, by
   eyewitness account, historical fact, or scientific research. In a world
   where reality can be created through sufficient repetition of
   bald-faced lies, we could no longer stomach inventing our own
   mistruths, even when they were intended as speculative glimpses of
   possible futures.

   To commemorate the amusing and thought-provoking April Fools Days of
   the past, we've put together a series of [4]every April Fools article
   that we ever published. Skim through, and see which ones speak to you
   today. Here are some that we're particularly proud of for their
   prescience.
     * '[5]SentientNET' (1991): Distributed computing is commonplace now,
       and you get a sense of how long TidBITS has been around from the
       way this article posited a group of Soviet programmers hailing from
       Minsk in the USSR.
     * '[6]A Whole New Ball Game' (1991): In the earliest days of TidBITS,
       we paid more attention to companies outside the Mac market, and we
       called [7]the IBM acquisition of Lotus four years before it
       actually happened.
     * '[8]Remote Backup' (1992): Internet backup was a pipe dream in
       1992, but it's not much of a stretch to go from our
       cobbled-together BackData solution of Retrospect, AppleTalk Remote
       Access, and a fast modem to services like [9]Backblaze.
     * '[10]Newt'sGrand Old Party' (1995): This article envisioned a
       Newton (remember the [11]Newton?) app that used a GPS transceiver
       and cellular modem to access a commercial online service listing
       all 'recreational gatherings' in Los Angeles. [12]Foursquare on an
       iPhone, anyone?
     * '[13]My First C Compiler' (1996): Perhaps [14]Swift Playgrounds
       would be better with assistants like Robby Recursion, Doctor
       Bracket, and Guy CGI.
     * '[15]Larger Newton Due This Spring' (1996): Our description of the
       ARM-based 'Newton LetterPad 200' sounds an awful lot like an iPad,
       with 'almost a standard sheet of paper worth of active screen
       surface' that 'can be rotated and used in either a horizontal or
       vertical orientation' and contains 'all of its controls within the
       active screen area.'
     * '[16]Apple Ups the AMTE' (1999): Although speech recognition has
       been around for a long time, this abstraction of a 'data
       translation matrix' prompted a description of a product that was
       almost exactly like what [17]Otter does today when transcribing
       recordings.
     * '[18]Segway for Kids Introduced' (2003): It took quite a while to
       get from our 'Segwee' to modern-day hoverboards (er,
       [19]self-balancing scooters), but now there's [20]an entire
       category of such products for sale at Amazon.
     * '[21]iPhone Goes International with Iridium' (2008): It took us
       only a year after the iPhone launch to suggest that Apple could add
       satellite phone capabilities. It still hasn't happened, but [22]an
       analyst's report last year about chips in the iPhone 13 caused
       satellite company stocks'including Iridium's to jump. iPhone 14,
       maybe?
     * '[23]iPhoto'sFaces and Places Designed to Track Terrorists?'
       (2009): Facial recognition and geolocation of photos were new in
       2009, but this article postulated that iPhoto was phoning home to
       the US Department of Homeland Security. Apple would never do such a
       thing, of course, [24]unless it involved CSAM detection.
     * '[25]What Apple Could Do with $40 Billion' (2010): This article
       proposing uses for Apple's cash hoard became increasingly silly as
       it went on, but the very first suggestion? Design the Mac's next
       CPU. How long has Apple been working on the M1, do you suppose?
     * '[26]Apple Plans App Store Shakeup with Franchises, Mac
       Applications' (2010): The suggestion that Apple would let Mac
       applications into the App Store was only months ahead of its time,
       with [27]the real announcement coming in October 2010. The idea of
       App Store franchisees may be forced on Apple soon enough if the
       company isn't careful'the European Union is heading in that
       direction with its [28]Digital Markets Act.
     * '[29]Apple to Offer Subscription Service and Subscription-Based
       Mac' (2011): It's surprising that Apple hasn't done this for the
       Mac yet, given the [30]iPhone Upgrade Program and the [31]Apple One
       bundle plan. However, Mark Gurman at Bloomberg writes that
       [32]Apple is working on a hardware subscription service.
     * '[33]iCloud for Families Debuts' (2013): Perhaps this was too
       obvious, since it took Apple only a year before debuting [34]Family
       Sharing in June 2014.
     * '[35]Install and Run OS X 10.9 Mavericks on the iPad Air' (2014):
       No, you can't run macOS on an iPad, but this article's suggestion
       that Apple was planning to use a future version of the A7 chip for
       the Mac would come true with the release of the M1 in 2020. And you
       can now run iPad apps on a Mac!

   I hope you enjoyed this look back at a simpler, less cynical, and more
   amusing past. What were your favorite TidBITS April Fools articles?

References

   1. https://tidbits.com/2011/04/01/microsoft-word-5-1-returns-to-the-ipad/
   2. https://tidbits.com/2011/04/01/microsoft-word-5-1-returns-to-the-ipad/
   3. http://www.smarterthanthat.com/astronomy/top-10-ways-to-know-the-earth-is-not-flat/
   4. https://tidbits.com/series/april-fools/
   5. https://tidbits.com/1991/04/01/sentientnet/
   6. https://tidbits.com/1991/04/01/a-whole-new-ball-game/
   7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Software?oldformat=true#Diversification_and_acquisition_by_IBM
   8. https://tidbits.com/1992/04/01/remote-backup/
   9. https://www.backblaze.com/
  10. https://tidbits.com/1995/04/01/newts-grand-old-party/
  11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton
  12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foursquare_City_Guide?oldformat=true
  13. https://tidbits.com/1996/04/01/my-first-c-compiler/
  14. https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/
  15. https://tidbits.com/1996/04/01/larger-newton-due-this-spring/
  16. https://tidbits.com/1999/04/01/apple-ups-the-amte/
  17. https://otter.ai/
  18. https://tidbits.com/2003/04/01/segway-for-kids-introduced/
  19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-balancing_scooter
  20. https://www.amazon.com/kids-segway/s?k=kids+segway
  21. https://tidbits.com/2008/04/01/iphone-goes-international-with-iridium/
  22. https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/globalstar-jumps-rumors-new-iphones-may-use-satellite-connectivity
  23. https://tidbits.com/2009/04/01/iphotos-faces-and-places-designed-to-track-terrorists/
  24. https://tidbits.com/series/csam-detection/
  25. https://tidbits.com/2010/04/01/what-apple-could-do-with-40-billion/
  26. https://tidbits.com/2010/04/01/apple-plans-app-store-shakeup-with-franchises-mac-applications/
  27. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mac%20app%20store
  28. https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/03/25/eu-will-force-apple-google-to-allow-third-party-app-stores-payment-services
  29. https://tidbits.com/2011/04/01/apple-to-offer-subscription-service-and-subscription-based-mac/
  30. https://www.apple.com/shop/iphone/iphone-upgrade-program
  31. https://www.apple.com/apple-one/
  32. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-24/apple-is-working-on-a-hardware-subscription-service-for-iphones
  33. https://tidbits.com/2013/04/01/icloud-for-families-debuts/
  34. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201060
  35. https://tidbits.com/2014/04/01/install-and-run-os-x-10-9-mavericks-on-the-ipad-air/

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