Humor writers are inadvertently prophetic at times -- just ask The Onion, whose joke about five-bladed razors was all too prescient. And apparently, that translates to the world of tech-themed comics. Hijinks Ensue and Sharksplode creator Joel Watson drew a comic in 2012 that predicted the iPad would get a Microsoft Surface-like keyboard cover in 2015... which it did, in the form of the iPad Pro's matching Smart Keyboard. The only real gaffe was imagining that the iPad keyboard would show up at WWDC, not a special event later in the year.
As Watson himself suggested at the time, this wasn't really a lucky guess so much as a logical deduction based on Apple's ages-old business strategy. It's rarely the first in a category, but it has a knack for refining and popularizing concepts that had trouble getting off the ground before. Witness what happened with tablets, in case you need proof. Microsoft spent 9 years trying to spark demand for Windows-based Tablet PCs, only towatch the iPad take over seemingly overnight -- in fact, the Surface line was a reaction to the hype surrounding the iPad. The Smart Keyboard may be far from original, but the only shocking thing about it is that some were shocked by it in the first place.
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