Apple Tablet
November 11, 2007You may have heard the stories concerning an ASUS exec letting slip that there’s an Apple tablet in the works. This may or may not be true; I’m sure that they’re constantly developing (say, eighty percent production ready) gadgets of all kinds.
Apple’s quest to put us at ease with technology
By Alice Rawsthorn
International Herald Tribune…Ive is lucky in that advances in technology have accelerated throughout his career. Having already had new polymers and composite materials to play with, and pioneered the transition from cathode ray tubes to flat panel displays in desktops, he is now excited by the possibility of replacing hard drives with smaller, more robust flash memory in laptops. “When everything is new, it’s a huge amount of work because you have to validate the most rudimentary assumptions,” he said. “Otherwise you can go a long way down the development path only to find that the product doesn’t work.”…
All very tantalizing. What would an Apple tablet really be like?
If we look at past Steve keynotes when he’s introducing an entirely new product, step one is pointing out what’s wrong with what’s already out there. If Steve where introducing Apple’s Tablet he would first show how the current crop use clunky pens (Ours uses your fingers, just like the iPhone, and also just like the iPhone – it uses the familiar iPhone keyboard and gorgeous glossy real glass display).
He will show how the current crop use tiny scroll bars that are hard to point to, and then show iPhone-style flick and pinch scrolling and Coverflow and QuickLook for file management. The display will be seven inches; just big enough to make a great book reader and web browser, and just small enough to mean you’ll always take it with you…
Ok, so what’s the killer app?
One might be how you could carry it around the house all day on a single charge, accessing your internet connection; viewing shared files on your network; controlling your Apple TV. One might be that your wireless keyboard talks to it, for serious editing. Or, that it would work as a great additional input device when back at your Mac…
Trouble is, none of the above is really a one sentence – gotta have this – compelling justification for the great unwashed to buy the thing. People who use current tablets either like the scribble with a pen modality that Apple would never condone because the whole idea is just too “ugly”, or they like the twist and fold versatility of the more complex models; definitely a non-starter.
So, no. My take is that the Apple Tablet is still just a research project. I would buy one (”You paid how much for that Newton?!?”), but unless this device which will be regarded as a consumer product and not a “computer,” talks just as easily to PCs as to Macs, and does something amazing that folks didn’t realize they craved until now, then next year’s Macworld will be about new studio displays.
And perhaps the 11 inch flash-based MacBook Svelte.
