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Take Two iTablets and Call Me In the Morning
Tuesday, January 19, 2010 / Apple Culture
Once upon a time, long, long ago, before Al Gore invented the internets and people only knew what they were told by professional writers in things called magazines, Apple and Steve Jobs controlled their very own universe. They sat in Cupertino and dreamed up new and exciting ways for people to interact with electronic devices, then Steve could take the stage in San Francisco and absolutely blow everyone away with a new gadget, upgrade or computer that no one saw coming.
Steve has since mastered many other arts of marketing and showmanship, but that heretofore cornerstone to his act is a little bit like taking the liquor away from W.C. Fields.
It’s just not the same anymore. But, W.C. is dead, and a whole lot of younger people might not even know who he was, so one thing is true: things change. I’m not sure Apple will ever be able to spring a huge surprise on us ever again.
But Apple is such the darling of today’s press that it really doesn’t need the element of surprise anymore. That was a great way to grab extra attention… but I daresay Apple gets more attention than it probably wants at this point.
Almost anyone who keeps up with technology at all surely knows Apple is about announce some sort of computing tablet. The internet is rife with speculation as to what it will work and act like. It’s becoming hard to imagine Apple actually pulling yet another rabbit out of its hat, and blowing us all away with some newfangled feature we never imagined or thought could be done.
Back in my day…
Long ago, Apple could have sprung a tablet out of nowhere and we’d all have been wowed and amazed and bought them in droves before many of us even knew whether we needed one.
Today, I will be absolutely blown away if Apple blows us away (which will be like two blow-aways, which may either give me a weeklong migraine or allow me to go at least a month without any kind of alcohol to feel rather giddy). Because while I understand the need for a better and faster computer, or an easier-to-use MP3 player, or a cooler cell phone, I don’t quite understand yet what a tablet is going to do for me that any of those things don’t do, at least something I’d want to pay for.
I own a Kindle (the e-book reader from Amazon), and love it to death. I may never buy another “real” book again. It’s light, it’s easy to read from, it gives me instant word definitions, and I can read one-handed, leaving my other to scratch my nether regions, grab a potato chip, or, if I just can’t stop multi-tasking, change the channel on the TV with the remote.
It also saves me from hauling three or four books on vacation, and is even lighter and easier than carrying one book for short trips.
But an Apple tablet is bound to be bigger than a Kindle, and I have a hard time thinking that it will replace anything else I carry. Indeed, if it’s so ruthlessly cool that I absolutely have to have one, when I travel I’ll be carrying a laptop, Kindle, iPhone, iPod (because the iPhone’s battery doesn’t last long enough for extended music listening and phone talking), headphones (because I don’t like Apple’s ear buds), a charger for each damn one of them because even Apple doesn’t standardize all its power cords… and then to throw a tablet on top of all that? It’s not so much the weight but finding enough outlets in the hotel room to keep everything charged up.
Oh, and not being able to tell the difference between a pit of very thin vipers in the bottom of my carry-on bag and the myriad cables that tangle themselves up as soon as I close the latch.
Is it for work or pleasure?
I also really can’t imagine a tablet replacing my laptop, even for just traveling, because I really doubt I’ll want to do extensive typing without a regular keyboard. Maybe Steve thinks we can re-train ourselves to type with two fingers on a screen, but while that’s fine for short responses and keeping up on things; to do real work, I need a keyboard. Maybe the demand for a bigger screen to watch videos -whether movies or YouTube- will be enough to make the thing worthwhile for Apple.
But you never know, it could also be the device that makes all sorts of people’s heads explode when they’re exposed to that one additional multimedia device that puts our brains into overload.
I hate predicting technology issues. From a practical standpoint, it’s mostly a matter of thinking that I’m fine with knowing what that gadget is once the manufacturer announces it, especially since any preliminary speculation is almost always a mishmash of guesswork and uncertain or dubious insider tips, none of which gives me certainty that I’m going to change anything in my life until the thing ships.
However, in this case, I’m a multiple personality: preparing myself to be blown away on one hand, preparing for a shrug on the other. I don’t discount Apple’s ability to amaze me at least one more time. I’m just perhaps more puzzled than I’ve ever been before as to how they’re going to do it. January 27th we shall know the truth, which won’t actually set us free, because no doubt Apple will charge a nice premium for whatever genius they’re selling.
And you know, if I’m not blown away and the thing is as popular as the Apple TV, which became a “hobby” for Apple when it didn’t sell like iPods, then I’ll have been right. I’d prefer to be blown away, but being right is pretty fun too.
January 22nd, 2010 at 9:33 am
Ah, so like a pessimist, you’re aiming for the best of both worlds: if you’re wrong, you’re happy it didn’t turn out that way. If you’re right, you got “I told you so” on your side.
I’m taking the optimistic approach. I know I’ll be blown away. (Still, I’m not that over the top, I’ll wait for version 2.0 to buy.
January 22nd, 2010 at 9:49 am
Al Gore didn’t invent the internet and never said that he did: http :// http://www.snopes.com /quotes/internet.asp
January 22nd, 2010 at 10:11 am
I also wonder what this tablet will do that what I have doesn’t already do. Some things are really cool but are you really going to pay for really cool? The Iphone was really cool and really useful, a game changer. I really hope that the tablet is a game changer at the right price.
January 22nd, 2010 at 11:11 am
The Apple Tablet does not need to be profoundly different in order to be amazingly popular and successful. Just being an iPhone with a 10 inch screen would be enough. It does not even need to make calls – just give us 3G connection to the Internet.
What will make it or break it for me is if it supports all document formats. What breaks Apple TV is it’s failure to supply real HD (1080P) and failure to support all Video formats (like avi!).
January 22nd, 2010 at 12:25 pm
You raised many interesting questions that only holding and using a iTablet will probably answer. I bought an iPhone thinking I’d just stop carrying around a phone, Palm, and finally buy and iPod (by the way, if you take the iPhone charger along you can have extended listening anywhere). I was blown away (and still am) discovering how much more it is. I disagree with you about the Kindle. That little 5 way button is tedious. The best thing about a Kindle, however, is having access to the iPhone Kindle app giving me Touch which is so much faster to annotate, make notes, and read with a backlit screen along with the smaller footprint on either my iPhone or my iPod.
January 22nd, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Only reason I haven’t bought an Apple TV is that it won’t do DVR. Curious, that. The iTablet will be HUGE in health care and any other industry where you see clipboards and similar charts. It will be a superb platform on which to develop checklist, flight ops, and navigation apps for pilots. If they put a GPS in it or at least allow the Bluetooth Serial Packet Protocol so it can talk to GPSR’s it will take map apps to a whole new level. Think of all the cool “in car” apps for those of us that don’t drive late model cars. With a little telemetry you have an instant dashboard. Try taking your laptop geocaching or exploring. Add that to the fact that Apple will have a built in cadre of developers (because it will no doubt use the same Xcode and Apple API’s as the Mac and the iPhone/iPod Touch and you will see creativity that will rival the iPhone. Apple has an ecosystem to make this work unlike any other competitor. That will almost ensure that if the device itself doesn’t blow your mind, what folks dream up to do with it will.
January 22nd, 2010 at 1:03 pm
This article failed in it’s goal to “make some sense of it”, but rather served to perpetuate the doubt about what “might be” and what “could be”. I don’t care what it is, or what it does, I’m definately going to buy one!
And, on another related note, while you inadvertently compared Jobs to W.C. Fields, the reality is that they were/are both showmen; masters of salesmanship, proving further that with the right schtick…there’s a sucker born every minute.
January 22nd, 2010 at 3:31 pm
I predict Apple will introduce…. [drum roll]… NOTHING!
The tablet PC concept has already been done to death. It didn’t work before, on a fundamental level. I doubt it will work, now. On any level.
It won’t have a keyboard, so it won’t replace the MacBooks. Who will want to run apps from the App Store on an 8″ or larger screen on a device that cost $800+? Even if it runs a full version of OSX and runs every application a regular Mac runs, why would you want to do that when you don’t have a keyboard, mouse or other input device? I can’t see myself editing photographs in Photoshop with the tip of my finger. It would probably have a solid state drive, which will drive the price way up, but no optical drive. It would probably be heavier than a Kindle, (which is a waste of money, I can get books a lot cheaper than through Amazon, it’s called a library, they’re free), the ‘buzz’ is that Apple will charge more for the books than Amazon, the battery won’t last as long as a Kindle and it won’t, initially, be as well supported as the Kindle, (if you want to pay $300+ just for something to read a book on, plus $10 a book). And it will break when you drop it. The market for accessories will be huge – cases, covers, screen covers, something to protect it from being dropped, to protect it from being lost, et cetera. If it doesn’t run standard Mac software, you will end up having to buy all brand new software. If it doesn’t run Windows, it will be a giant step backwards in compatibility, (I can’t believe I just said that.)
Apple already has a tablet – the iPod Touch or the iPhone. Introducing something else that does the same thing will gut the sales of these devices. iPhones and iPods are Apple’s cash cows. They are practically like printing money. Why would Apple shoot themselves in the foot by introducing something that would torpedo them?
Sorry, no tablet.
Of course, I could be wrong. Apple could shoot itself in the foot. They could make something that will end up in DigiBarn in six months…
January 22nd, 2010 at 4:13 pm
…and who would have thought Apple could have sold a $400 5 gig MP3 player in 2001?
Alan
January 22nd, 2010 at 4:37 pm
To George – when Kevin said Gore invented “the internetS”, that pluralization should have clued you in to the fact that it was a joke.
Kevin – What if it is in fact a “Color Kindle”? And like Jonathan wants, an iPhone with a 10-inch screen? Even if it only had 3G web connection – there’s always Skype. If THIS is what they are announcing, the only thing I would demand is very long battery life. Several days, at least; A week would be spectacular. I want one!
January 22nd, 2010 at 11:05 pm
George: Methinks Mr. Anderson was having a little fun with the apochryphal Al Gore “Internets” bit (and poking a bit of fun at our previous Commander in Chief for good measure). Gotta know humor when it’s presented to you.
As to the forthcoming iWhatchamacalit: I merely predu=ict it’ll be interesting enough to give Mr. Bezos at least a wee bit of heartburn for at least a few months. Yes, Jobs was the one to infamously slag the Kindle by stating “nobody reads any more), but I simply ran the phrase through my reverse-engineered RAD generator and came up with this translation: “It’s interesting, and we’ll have something that’ll stomp it in two years or less.”
Me? Like Anderson, the last thing on my mind is latching onto yet another gadget, however svelte and sexy and possibly useful in some yet-to-be-ascertained way. If anything, I’m trying to REDUCE the gadget-count on my person while out and about. Since I’m still a big fan of the “classic” Palm OS, I just scored myself a Palm Centro, the last smartphone, near as I can tell, to support the Palm OS before Palm went ga-ga with WebOS on the Pre. This cuts my handheld gadget-count by one. Progress!
- Barrett
January 23rd, 2010 at 6:46 am
We always need to remember that this is Apple we are talking about. The iPod is in fact just an MP3 player. It wasn’t the first one, and you can argue that when it was launched it wasn’t even the best choice because of the price, but it quickly became the most popular one. Same thing here. There are other netbooks and other tablet like devices, but I fully expect Apple’s entry in this space to be spectacular.
January 23rd, 2010 at 8:29 am
I thought it was supposed to be a device to allow the “usual pulp” publishers to go completely electronic in distribution. In addition to the “tablet” they must also have some sort of distribution/subscription service set up.
Then again, it could just play Solitaire?!?
January 24th, 2010 at 7:21 am
“Just being an iPhone with a 10 inch screen would be enough.”
Holding it up to my head to take calls would be inconvenient.
January 24th, 2010 at 10:33 am
If the screen is so small, the user has to wear tri-focals to view it, and the keys are tiny, it seems to me that the target market will be a younger generation that mine. Smaller does not always make it more desirable. P.S. I could be wrong about this, but I believe Apple presented the iTablet at a West Linn Middle School recently.
April 5th, 2010 at 9:27 am
Ok, my 2 cents are that I would definitely NOT buy one of these until at least the 2 MAJOR flaws are fixed. The absence of flash technology is a glaring omission on all of Apple’s portable products. How in the world can you say that you can surf the web effortlessly when tone of the most popular technologies won’t even work? Secondly but even more grievous, the lack of a camera of any kind is absurd. The iPad is intended to be an in between device somewhere between a laptop and an iTouch. NO CAMERA? What was Jobs thinking? It’s still a make believe product completely unfinished most likely to allow the future sale of the same product with at least the camera built in. Shame on Apple!