Apple rumoured to be developing iRover with much better camera

8th September 2012

With interest in Martian rovers at an all-time high it comes as no surprise to hear rumours that Apple is developing a revolutionary space robot of their own, which promises to revolutionise the industry.

Dubbed the iRover by Apple rumour websites, tech journalists have gone into overdrive speculating about how their favourite company might revolutionise the industry they feel NASA has allowed to stagnate.

“The first thing they will need to address is the camera” Apple fanatic Chuck Hankman explained, “The Mars Curiosity rover that NASA built only has a crappy 2 megapixel camera that can capture 1600x1200 resolution images. I’m sorry, what? My iPhone has four times the pixels of that and the screen on my iPad has a much higher resolution.

“And the Mars Rover cost 2.5 billion dollars and weighs the same as a car. If my iPhone cost that much and weighed that much I would expect it to have more pixels than God.”

Another area that Apple fans feel that the Martian rovers could be improved is their aesthetics:

“Look at these so called ‘advanced’ rovers” Hankman continued “Full of wheels, and boxes and ugly appendages? Really, Jony Ive would never let anything as hideous as that within a 5 mile radius of Cupertino. What is it with non-Apple designers that they feel they need to make everything so complicated?

“If I was Jonathan Ive, I would design something much sleeker. It would have perfect ergonomics. As for the wheels, it’d have no wheels. Just like when the iPhone came along and got rid of buttons, the iRover would be totally wheel-less. Why are our rovers still trundling along on wheels like 2,000 year old chariots? This is the 21st century, our rovers should levitate.

“I hear that they put an artificial intelligence on the Curiosity probe because it takes 15 minutes for the signals to get back to mission control, something to do with the speed of light or something.” Hankman mused, “The thing is, if you’re going to put an AI on a device, why wouldn’t you put Siri? The delay with Siri is only a second, two if the Apple servers are really busy.”

When asked how he thought the iRover would perform at the wide array of scientific tasks that Curiosity is expected to undertake over the next two years, Hankman had one simple answer:

“None.” He said, “That’s where NASA is going wrong. They are filling up their rover designs with all this complicated technology that there is no need to expose the end user to. End users don’t understand what a mass spectrometer is, they don’t need to do sedimentary analysis.

“They don’t need to search water. They need to search for coffee – which is why I fully expect that the iRover will be partnered with Starbucks so its GPS sensor can immediately point you in the direction of the nearest outlet. Unlike Curiosity, iRover won’t need to search for beverages, it’ll know where they already are.”