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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."
They are very simple illustrations, not photos.
Would a Mac tablet ever see the light of day? This is not intended as a
troll/flame, but how big is the market for a niche product from a niche
computer manufacturer?
A mirror of the photos^H^H^H^H^H^Hillustrations is here.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
My iBook isn't going to happy when she sees that come home with me. :(
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
It looks, should they make it, to be smaller and lighter than a "current" tablet PC. Kinda like an oversized PDA. Like a Newton and a Powerbook got freeky in the back room...
Its so pure, I think I'm going to cry...
Seriously though, I am hoping to see something like this in the near future. Hopefully it will be 'announced' in the next Macworld Boston. Inkwell is such a nice pice of software, it would be great to see it being used in a tablet.
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
It's actually a revolutionary new transportation system which will enable people to get about without requiring gasoline. In snow you simply stand upon it and carve your way downhill or grab a fender and glide along behind traffice. In the summer attach trucks and wheels and you've got it finished.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Sorry about the misleading title. (A case of fingers before brain) There are illustrations from the patent, not photos. (Perhaps this can be corrected). Anyway, my apologies on that.
Some of us pointed that out to the editors before it was published, but they chose to ignore us (surprise, surprise, surprise)
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Though the pictures don't indicate this, I wonder if they could also be filling in a few final functional gaps to turn the iPod into a full-blown PDA? Tantalizing as that might be, it's probably unlikely as well, seeing as how they're making bigger margins on the iPod Photo than PDA manufacturers are making on their product...
Crow T. Trollbot
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
Ummm the mp3 market used to be a niche market. Who has about an 80% market share now?
I noticed that in Apple Quartz Composer, there is mention of a TABLET pen location. I tried this with my Wacom Graphire, and no luck. At this point, I figured that apple must be making new drivers for existing tablets. Well, I guess it's an APPLE BRAND TABLET PC!!! Whoohoo!.
"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.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Very funny, Jobs. And this is different from my palmpilot how, exactly? Oh, yours is bigger, you say?
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
What killed the Newton was syncronization. All the stuff I wrote on the newton was difficult to transfer to the Mac. All my contacts on the Mac was difficult to reliably syncronize to the newton. Don't tell me how to do it. I have used a newton from the day it came out until they day they kiled it. I have all the tools, cards, utilities, whatever. I still ahve 2000 sitting in it's leather case in my house.
So, as soon as palm V came out, small, sync, everything, I was all over it. It was could not be a writing machine, but I could live with that. My Newton became more trouble than it was worth.
But Apple now has sync, at least for what can fit on the .Mac drive. It does not sync macs, and I have found nothing that will do so quickly over 802.11b, but you can do calendars, contacts, mail, and good number of documents, which is has made my life so much easier.
So, this tablet PC, which will have bluetooth and airport, can do what the newton never could. Be an effective remote terminal. You can carry it around for an hour or a day, and, within a few minutes, all relevent changes can be transfered. You can take it to the coffee house, sync to .Mac, and by the time you get back home, your big machine can be updated.
Am I sorely afraid I will buy this thing. Yes. I don't really know what I would use it for, which is the rub. If it is like an iTablet, consumer priced, it would be fun to have. If it was PowerTablet, the investment would be difficult.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
It's ok, it's only a computer, and it doesn't have a personality.
Quiet, you'll hurt it's feelings!
Now I understand why they have been so stuck on 1 button!!!
:-)
A touchpad!
Oooohh.. Jobs was ahead of the curve all along...
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Courtesy of PatentMojo.comDoesn't this violate the Etch-a-Sketch design patent?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Tiger (10.4) has a built-in feature that allows you to rotate the screen.
Go the the System Preferences and then hold down the option key while you click the Displays button. You will see a pulldown thats labeled "Rotate". Select it and you will see your screen rotate.
All I have to say about this is: 20030076303.
Words per minute I can type: about 80 Words per minute I can handwrite: about 15 Why do I need a tablet again?
Music - www.richardmac.com
iPad.
This is obviously the PowerBook G5. Not shown is the processor, which will be incorporated into the power supply. :)
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
I heard there was some guy who wrote a top ten list of his favourite activities on a pair of tablets. That's gotta be prior art!
...no one apart from Apple will be allowed to make a tablet Macintosh?
TIHS ILLEGAL MONOPOLY MUST STOP!!!
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
Also, while Apple only has like 4% of the PC market, they have a MUCH bigger chunk of the laptop market.
But let's face it. If Apple wants to release a niche product at a premium, the are free too. If it stays niche, then no problem. If the market explodes, it would get cheaper (economies of scale and all that).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
With the speed of the patent office being what it is, maybe this is a patent for the Newton, finally being granted.
moo.
If Apple turned the 12" PB or iBook into a table, that would rock.
They already have. They call it a 17" PowerBook.
Now white headphones are becoming as ubiquitous as cell phones.
In Steve Jobs' dreams perhaps. There were almost 700 million cell phones sold last year and an estimated 800-900 million this year.
How many ipods?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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.
:-), 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).
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
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.
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.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
no, the mp3 player market faltered for a while before Apple picked up the slack.
The tablet market has faltered for a while too, let's see what comes of it.
- X
- Y
- Tilt X
- Tilt Y
- Pressure
- Tip Button
- Lower Button
- Upper Button
Also worth noting from the ADC Library documentation (for Cocoa) above:Important: Tablet events are available in Mac OS X v10.4 and later versions of the operating system.
On a similar note, Quartz Composer showed up in Mac OS X 10.4 as well. Note the pictures in the ADC document as well. They depict a tablet connected to an iMac or Apple display. It seems to me that none of this is talking about a tablet PC. If it is, they sure went through a great deal to hide it.Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
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.
This msg is brought to you by the letter 'W'.. for Worthless Wuss
Whoops! Research please!
Apple Computer is a huge computer manufacturer. In fact, they are the 5th biggest in terms of recent US sales figures, and sales are increasing more rapidly than any other manufacturer. [Source: IDC, 4Q2004 report]
So even though Apple only holds 3.8% of the market:
1. Dell @ 17% of market
2. HP, @ 16% of market
3. IBM, @ 5% of market
4. Gateway, @ 4% of market
5. Apple @ 3.8% of market
And there you have it. They may be small compared to Microsoft's 95% OS penetration, but they are large in terms of being a product manufacturer, neatly falling in the "2nd tier by volume" along with IBM and Gateway.
actually, I'm referring to their dubious patent on the iTunes software interface. and no, I don't require your explanation of design patents. they are harmful, and must be neutralized.
I sure can.
here
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Labtop
It's the top of a labrador. Apple is going to release the top of a labrador retriever.
Don't get the first version; it's full of bugs.
Apple actually built a prototype Mac (System 7) tablet back in the mid-90's. They got as far as the "prototype" plastics being made and did a small run for internal testing (maybe a couple of dozen?). I saw some in use in the Tokyo office in '96 where they were being used to test the (Japanese language) handwriting recognition software. They were sturdy enough for day to day use and were left in the lunchroom for employees to use (the idea was to get lots of input with different people's handwriting styles). I don't recall why the project was killed then.
That is why we have trademarks.
No, actually, it isn't. A trademark is entirely different. For example, a trademark prevents someone from putting your logo on their product, whether it looks like your product or not. A design patent prevents someone from copying the design of your product, no matter what logo they put on it.
It is a dangerous precedent for design elements to be patentable.
Except it isn't a precedent at all -- design patents aren't a recent thing. They were incorporated into patent law in 1842. It seems like they are among the least dangerous parts of current patent law.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.