An interesting read by Andy Ihnatko....
Thoughts on what an Apple tablet should be – or not
January 7, 2010
By ANDY IHNATKO
My Wednesday began with a worried focus on tablet computers.
Before lunchtime I closed my eyes, commended my soul to God, and bought roundtrip airfare to San Francisco for the last week of January.
And why? Has Apple announced a press event that week? No, they have not. But they’ve reserved the same hall they rented for their fall iPod event. If they do hold an event, do I know that I’ll be invited? If I’m invited, do I know that the purpose of the event will be to demonstrate a new Apple tablet computer? If it’s a new tablet computer, do I know that I’ll get a little alone time with the thing?
You see my problem. I really wished that the final button on Hotwire was labeled “Purchase This Flight ... Damn Your Eyes!”
It’s not so much the quality of the latest “Apple will unveil their long-rumored tablet” scuttlebutt that convinced me to make the gamble…it’s the velocity. It’s hard to codify but as the debut of an under-wraps Apple device becomes imminent, Apple begins to collectively sigh with relief. The noise leaks out through the weatherstripping of the company’s legendary Storm Door Of Silence and though it doesn’t say anything as helpful as “10.2-inch OLED touchscreen, $699, mobile broadband contract is optional” it does say “Andy, book yourself a trip to San Francisco.”
After ... what, two years of speculation, I’m pretty sure we’ll soon know what there is to know about Apple’s tablet computer. Today’s the perfect day to engage in one last buffet of guesswork. None of this will be of any value after the (hopeful) announcement, so I need to empty out the fridge before it all spoils. And since this (please) event is three weeks away, you’ll probably have forgotten about all the stuff I was wrong about.
I remind you that I haven’t seen any sort of Apple Tablet and I have no sources that (to my knowledge) have any hard facts about the thing. What follows is just the sum total of my best guesswork about the Rumored Apple Tablet ... here as always referred to as the RAT.
The RAT will have a “slate” form factor.
Some folks are predicting something that looks like a book, but I put no stock in that concept. First, because two color screens would be ungodly expensive, but foremost because I think Apple would see that as an inelegant solution to any problem the RAT was meant to solve. It’ll be about the size of a Kindle, with a 10” color screen that will force its reviewers to look through their final drafts and ask themselves if they can’t come up with a word that isn’t as overused as “breathtaking.”
The price will be above $500 but below $800.
Apple won’t skimp on the display, and they’re not making a pocket device. That means it can’t sell for less than $500. And Apple will understand that the price will telegraph the RAT’s role; if they price it as high as a notebook (or as high as what notebooks cost on Planet Apple), it’ll be expected to carry water like a notebook.
Apple tried pricing the iPhone at $600 and had initial success with that until they needed to retreat back down to conventional “smartphone” pricing. I think they’ll follow that same lead here: it’ll be price-competitive with a midrange Windows notebook. Call it $650.
Like the iPhone, it’ll be a closed system.
You’ll get a headphone jack, a SIM slot, Apple’s proprietary dock connector, and that’s it. No access to the inside for any reason whatsoever. It won’t mount on your desktop as mass-storage or anything else.
It’ll be SSD based.
32 gigabytes of storage standard, with a high-end model with 64 gigs.
A monthly wireless broadband contract will not be required.
I have tremendous difficulty imagining Apple selling an expensive device that costs an additional $1200 for two years of 3G service. I absolutely can’t conceive of it. It was different when Apple charged $599 for the first iPhone; a monthly bill, and paying extra for data, are accepted parts of smartphone culture.
But this is Apple. If they think of “Internet everywhere” as an integral part of the RAT’s raison d’etre, they’ll do it.
I gotta choose: I’m saying they won’t take the risk of a mandatory monthly charge. Either they’ll offer a WiFi-only configuration or every Rat will have the capability of joining a wireless broadband network, should the user choose to sign up for access.
No hardware keyboard.
Well, duh: it’ll be a touchscreen device. But though I want the RAT to support a touch-typable mechanical keyboard, I don’t believe it’ll be available even as a third-party option.
Two reasons: “An external third-party keyboard would be ugly.” Apple takes aesthetics and function very seriously. They would either include a keyboard themselves, or they wouldn’t include keyboard support of any kind. “Buy a $50 Bluetooth keyboard and prop up the Rat like a notebook screen somehow”? No.
But primarily because (and here I need to put on my Sean Connery voice, a la Captain Ramius in “The Hunt For Red October”) “When Cortez reached the new world, he set fire to his ships. This left his men very well-motivated.”
Apple wants this to be a touch-based computer. If you give people a physical keyboard, they’ll think of the touch system as merely an alternative to the mechanical interface they’re already familiar with.
Worse — and this is what convinces me there won’t be any keyboard support — it’ll subconsciously urge consumers to think of the RAT as a netbook. It can’t possibly compete with a $350 device that runs weaker, but reassuringly familiar, software.
No, you’ll get a big “soft” keyboard with excellent predictive text and autocorrection and that’s it.
It’ll run its own OS (based on OS X) but it’ll be part of the iPhone’s app ecosystem.
After solidly convincing the community of mobile developers that iPhone apps are a modern gold rush, Apple will expand that equity by allowing current iPhone developers to create software for the RAT by simply adding to their existing skill set. The same tools and techniques that go into building an iPhone app will apply here.
It’ll rely on third-party apps to round out its functions and justify its expense. Just like the iPhone. You don’t get back its purchase price from its out-of-the-box functions. But within a month, when you’ve installed the ten apps you simply can’t live without (whatever they might be) the iPhone seems cheap at double the price.
The RAT will use the App Store as its sole source of software. Duh. Apple has created a brilliant economy in which they keep 30 cents of every dollar transacted. Would you want to slow down that gravy train?
Apple will not sell periodicals and books through the iTunes Store.
At least not in the way that they sell music and movies, as discrete products. Instead, they’ll stick to the mechanism that the iPhone uses: publishers and distributors can release their own apps and build their own storefronts for their own content.
It saves Apple from innumerable headaches and opens the RAT up to be “the reader of Everything.” It also emphatically continues Apple’s momentum as the publishing platform of choice.
Are you Time-Warner? Great. Release a free “newsstand” app for your group’s publications. Apple’s SDK supports in-app purchases. The user can buy or subscribe to magazines easily; the publisher gets ongoing sales through the biggest store for digital mobile content, and as usual, Apple gets a big cut of every dollar spent on that planet.
Are you an independent publisher? Or maybe even just an author with a collection of short-stories? Great. Hook up with an iPhone developer and hand over a copy of your book in PDF or HTML format. He or she can quickly stick it in an app wrapper and you can release it as an saleable ebook without going through any publishers or distributors. There’s no vetting process; Apple is happy to just take 30 percent of the purchase price.
Honestly, Apple just sits back and counts the money, without having to worry overmuch about being editors, censors, or arbiters of quality. From the publishers’ point of view, it allows them a lot of flexibility. The core OS of the RAT and the iPhone contains one of the most powerful engines for dynamic digital content: the WebKit rendering engine. If they build their newspapers and magazines so that it can be described by HTML5, the OS will do the rest.
And because WebKit is an open library, it’s also used by Android. Build your content for Apple touch devices and then you can ultimately move it to Android. Win-win.
Conclusion: it makes no sense for Apple to become publishers or distributors of this kind of material. It just gets in the way of making money, for all concerned.
The RAT will be as completely unlike the iPod Touch and the MacBook as the iPhone was to the iPod and every other smartphone.
You get a lot of overlap and internal head-butting in other tech companies. The people who run the netbook division of DiscoWare wish no harm to any other living creature, but if the people in charge of DiscoWare’s notebook division were to fall facefirst into a stump grinder, they’d have an immediate proposal for how that division’s budget and personnel could best be absorbed by the netbook group.
Apple’s different. If The Coca-Cola Company were run like Apple, they’d have just one brand of zero-calorie cola, not three. Apple sees its product line as a cast of characters, through which they tell a single story. If two products seem to do the same job, then one of them needs to go.
For that reason, any concept you might have of the RAT as “an alternative to a notebook” or “a super-big iPod Touch” has to be dismissed, unless you can make a case for why Apple will stop selling the $999 MacBook or the iPod Touch.
So what will the RAT’s user interface and function set be like?
Hell if I know. I’m convinced that even the smartest predictions can only peg about half of the RAT. Apple has never been afraid to be bold and go big. We all “knew” that Apple was working on a phone. But like all groundbreaking products, it surprised everybody whose predictions were based on devices, concepts, and technologies that they’d already seen.
I’ll say two things, one of which was (damn and blast) echoed by the consistently smart John Gruber over on DaringFireball.net before I turned this file of notes into something publishable: Apple always asks themselves simple and stupid questions like “How will this device be used?” and “Will this be used by human beings with, I mean, arms and hands and fingers?” and stuff like that.
The iPhone UI isn’t a desktop user interface where a pen takes the place of a mouse ... which is the model that previous smartphones followed. It was designed to be held in one hand and tapped with your thumb. Occasionally you’d use the index finger of the right hand to key things in.
You want to try to figure out the UI of the RAT? Go get yourself a comic book, or any other rectangle that measures roughly 10” on the diagonal. Hold it as though you’re reading what’s on the surface.
You see the problem? Your fingers get in the way. Think about how big that surface is, too. That’s a lot of acreage to scan, looking for the right buttons to push.
While you’ve got it in your hands, imagine that it’s a sheet of thin steel. That’s heavy, isn’t it? Hard to hold up for long periods of time.
Think about how a user interface would have to incorporate those observations. Now imagine that you’ve been doing this experiment for four years and not four minutes.
That’s a very long list of observations. If you didn’t come up with a workable solution, don’t worry: I think Apple has.
This is why I have to circle back to my assertion that here and now, nobody outside of Apple can predict more than half of what the RAT will be about.
That said ...
The RAT will be like a pair of glasses. Not a sheet of paper or a computer screen.
It will, no doubt, incorporate all of the features of a Kindle. It will also contain lots of overlap with what you’d get from a netbook.
But philosophically, the RAT will be something more subtle. It won’t serve as the thing you’re reading or the document you’re working on. In time, the user will come to regard the RAT as a window through which they can observe and navigate the modern digital world.
(Yeah, I know. That sounded a lot less hippie-like in my head. But stick with me, I beg you.)
I probably can’t justify $600 for a netbook. Which is why the RAT will be as unlike a netbook as you can possibly imagine. A netbook is a device that you haul out to do a little writing, or check some email, or goof around on some blogs.
The perception of the RAT will be that it’s a conduit that pipes the digital world down to wherever you happen to be. The iPod Touch is “a device that plays music and video files.” The RAT will be “access to music and video.” The Kindle is “an ebook reader.” The RAT will be “the ability to find and read any written material anywhere in the world.”
A netbook is “a stripped-down Windows XP subnotebook.” A RAT will be “a way for all of my projects and documents, and communication with my social world, to follow me wherever I go.”
With that line, I’m at the outer fringes of “I don’t even want to go there”-land. Will the RAT be emphatically a cloud-based system? I can’t guess. I’ll be very disappointed if it didn’t let me “project” my desktop experience into the device. Either by maintaining a link to shared directories on my PC and Mac, or simply by encouraging some exciting and creative apps that tie me back to MobileMe, or my Pogoplug or Box.net and Dropbox and other services that allow me to place parts of my digital life into cloud storage.
The critical difference between the RAT and all other tablets will be in how the user comes to relate to the thing. Folks of a certain age want to watch TV, read a newspaper, check their mail, but there’s always a declaration that has to be made before the task can be undertaken:
“Hang on ... I need my glasses.”
Ultimately, if Apple does the RAT right — and I have great confidence — their tablet will come across as an extension and enhancement to your senses and awareness. Not just a $650 way to get sports scores while sitting in the smallest room in your house.
But wait just a minute
Before we get all misty-eyed here about Apple as a company with an unblemished track record for insight and innovation, I should leave you with the words “Apple TV.”
Apple was quick out the door with a box that plugs into your HDTV and streams content from your media library. Apple released it three years ago and its done little but displace air (mostly on shelves at Apple Stores) every since. The Apple Tablet could be a repeat of the same mistakes. The operative mistake of the AppleTV seems to have been to design a box that’s ideally suited towards serving up all of the media you have, as opposed to being thought of as a box that can deliver all of the media there is.
But Apple learns and improves. And there’s a huge infrastructure of software and content for an Apple tablet that still has yet to gel for the AppleTV. Assuming that the Apple Tablet won’t partly supplant the AppleTV in functions. Do understand that all kinds of output is possible via that dock connector.
Then again ...
... And, of course, assuming there’ll even be an Apple Tablet, or an iSlate, or whatever we think they’re going to call it.
My course is clear. My airfare is non-refundable. During the final week of January, I hope to be sitting in an auditorium at Yerba Buena Gardens learning about the Apple Tablet.
If I fly out there and Apple doesn’t hold their rumored launch event, then I’ll drive down to Cupertino. I’ll stand outside the Apple campus in a trenchcoat holding a boombox over my head, playing a Peter Gabriel song up at the upper windows until Steve Jobs is so touched by this romantic gesture that he sends me away with an engineering sample.
Dammit, something needs to be done. This frustrating state of affairs simply can’t continue.
