Apple Patents Tablet Mac (with Photos)

jkheit writes "I wrote a quick news item over at the Mac Observer that might be of interest. Apple patents a tablet Mac. The new photos confirm that this device is a touch-screen Apple tablet. You can see it here."

Comments

Re:Photos???? Comment + mirror

[Ty]

Ummm the mp3 market used to be a niche market. Who has about an 80% market share now?

Re:Patent?

[Aqua OS X]

"Like no one has ever thought of making a tablet before? There has to be more to this if it is true."

Ya, but this is exactly what people said when Apple made the iPod.
Apple likes to swoop on good ideas that have been poorly implemented in the past. MP3 players, jukebox software, online music stores, video chat, etc etc. None of this stuff was new, but Apple found a way to make it more accessible and desirable.

Single mousebutton!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I understand why they have been so stuck on 1 button!!!

A touchpad!

Oooohh.. Jobs was ahead of the curve all along... :-)

Re:Single mousebutton!

[michaeldot]

Slightly sarcastic? But indeed you're right. My Tablet PC works much better with software designed with just one button in mind.

While most tablet styluses come with a right-button in the lower half of the pen, they're often easy to accidentally press and many users like myself instead disable it and set the tablet settings to treat a TAP-AND-HOLD as a right-click.

When you're not holding a mouse, "right-clicking" a tablet is a slower means of interacting. Software designed with one button in mind works much more efficiently and naturally.

This is quite important, as until Tablet PC "takes off" (it hasn't by any means), most software that runs on is mainstream, non-tablet-aware software. An OS which encourages one-mouse development could have a distinct advantage.

Um, no.

[MadMacSkillz]

Words per minute I can type: about 80 Words per minute I can handwrite: about 15 Why do I need a tablet again?

Re:Using Tiger

[MBCook]

Don't forget this has other uses. For example you could mount your LCD on a swivel stand or on your wall in portrait mode, then use function to make the screen "right side up".

If Apple did this, I would expect the screen to automatically rotate what is "up" based on how you hold the tablet. The little gyro in the latest PowerBooks should be enough to allow them to do that.

The touchscreen is different from tablets

[-Harlequin-]

Note that this patent is for a finger touchscreen tablet like a PDA, and my tablet has a wacom pressure-sensitive pen digitizer in the screen.

This is interesting. A year ago, I was predicting that Apple would get on the tablet bandwagon (and possibly pull off another ipod), because tablets are so suited to art, which is ostensibly one of apples big markets. (I have a normal wacom digitizer on my desktop, but I find I prefer to use the screen digitiser of may tablet for photoshop, etc, - even though the CRT of the desktop beats any LCD on a portable).

Yet their design is for a finger touch screen. This would make for perhaps a better interface than pen for something simple like an ebook or portable video player (a video ipod allowing you rent DRMed movies from apple :-), but not so useful as an art / design machine (my understanding is that to have both pressure-sensitive pen and finger, you would need two seperate, difference hardware systems on the screen, which would be expensive).

I have a convertable tablet (it operates in slate and laptop mode), and my experience is that it is a vast improvement over laptops when in laptop mode, but slate mode, while kind of cool, it typically limited to low-input tasks like watching DVDs, because I type at twice the speed I write.

So I doubt this tablet is going to be marketed as a mac. It may contain a mac, but it's going to take aim at more specialised tasks.

Unless they stick one of those laser keyboards on it that convert any flat surface into a keyboard. It's about time someone built one of those into a slate computer.

And now that epaper is becoming possible, ebook readers that failed to suck might be another ipod waiting to happen.

Re:Patent?

[dr.badass]

this is rather like apple's patent on the itunes interface. problematic by itself, and depressing if it becomes a precedent for future patent maneuvering.

A design patent is not quite the same as what one normally thinks of when talking about patents. Basically all this move indicates is that nobody can release a tablet that looks like what Apple would design. It's meant to prevent rip-offs, not stifle innovation. Of course, I fully expect someone to claim that rip-offs are innovative.

Re:billions?

[cosmic_0x526179]

In Steve Jobs' dreams perhaps. There were almost 700 million cell phones sold last year and an estimated 800-900 million this year.

The grandparent post is more correct than you give it credit for. A cellphone is used for how many minutes per hour on average... maybe 5 ? An average iPod owner probably exceeds 30 mins per hour average usage. So, if you multiply the number of iPods sold by the visibility factor the iPod is becoming ubiquitous.

Re:it will work this time

[Khelder]

I used a Newton for years (first the original MessagePad and then the MP100). For me, the fatal flaw was that it was both too big and too small:

* Too big to fit in my pocket so I could carry it with me everywhere
* Too small to be able to see very much data at once

On the plus side, the interface was amazing. It was actually designed to be used with a pen, not just a modified desktop UI.

So now I use a Palm, because it lets me have my calendar and contact info with me all the time (as well as other stuff, of course, but the main thing I use it for is calendar and contacts). And its interface is ok.

But I still miss my Newton. I'd love to have a Newtonesque tablet. Even one with a display the size of a steno pad would be excellent.