After another fairly annoying morning with my printer, I was reminded of this satirical post that the Onion ran on Tim Cook and Printers. The premise of this was basically that printers were as dull as a topic anyone could think of (basically emphasizing the difference between the creative Steve Jobs and the very operationally centric Tim Cook)
| New Apple CEO Tim Cook: ‘I’m Thinking Printers’
SAN FRANCISCO-Following the resignation of Apple founder Steve Jobs, incoming CEO Tim Cook called a meeting of shareholders and members of the press Thursday morning to announce that he envisioned printers as the company’s future. “Laser, ink-jet, double-sided, color, black-and-white-the future of technology is in printers.
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And yet I really do think printers need their “ipod” moment. We have for far too long been stuck with a purely utilitarian implementation that is a cause of frustration more often than not. Anyone remember this sketch by Eddie Izzard?
So I really like this printer concept that I saw last week. This may of course be overkill, but I can’t wait till I have a printer that actually is joyous to use.
Of course I feel the days of the printer may be numbered. I hardly ever use mine except to occasionally print boarding passes for the few airlines that dont yet generate emails with those as QR codes, but still if I do have to have one, I want one of those 🙂
Update:
Meanwhile there are folks at Bergcloud who are completely reimagining printers more as a toy.
Hello Little Printer, available 2012 from BERG on Vimeo.
Code Zen 