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Is Apple's proposed "smart bike" a dumb move?
When Steve Jobs farts, the world takes note. That is my take on yesterday's blogospheric storm about the company's request for a patent for a smart bike.
Apple smart bike design
Apple, selling bikes? Crazy, right? Well, it's unclear what kind of bike it would be, exactly, except that it would have a nice little rack for an iPod or -Pad, which would tell other riders' gadgets how fast you're going, where you are, what the traffic's like, and so forth.
Maybe I'm just missing it, but it sounds to me like Apple is making an expensive new carrier case for the same old gizmos, while also creating a serious risk of very distracted biking — which is awfully dangerous.
Meanwhile, the Knight Rider of the bike world already exists and is Tweeting its way across the country to raise money for cancer research through LIVESTRONG — and it's hardly making a PR ripple.
Yes, it's a bike with a brain, and the really unfortunate name Precious. The tricked out Specialized steed — ridden by a young Brit known only as Janeen — collects data from a number of sensors, and sends them back to a server. When the servers stumble upon an interesting nugget or cluster, they tweet. Precious is even snarky enough to fit right in with the human twitterers: "Hayter's Gap is for haters. I hate it. She hates it. The other mountains don't invite it to poker night. Sad."
But some bikes have all the luck, I guess.
| August 10 2010 at 11:39 AM
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