Apple Tablet Rumors Again (Still?)

LSU_ADT_Geek writes "With a conventional netbook clearly out of the question, researchers for Piper Jaffray said Thursday there's mounting evidence to suggest Apple next year will introduce its own take on the market in the form of a tablet-based device that will sell for $700 or less."

Comments

Cool story bro

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like the apple wheel

Newton 2

[Onyma]

I knew I kept my Newton for a reason... now I can be snotty and say "Oh yeah, I had one first" when it becomes popular. Now where did I put it...

Seriously as said above I can't see it selling that cheaply but I really did love the Newton despite its quirks. I still believe it died because it was just a little too far ahead of its time. Palm drove the last nail in its coffin with a smaller, lighter, more practical device. I would be interested to see what Apple could come up with for a tablet now with their focus on touch egonomics and a decade+ of hardware advancement.

3rd party conversion

[OzPeter]

There is already a company that does conversions of Macbooks to a tablet format, so the idea is not unprecedented and there must be a market for it.

Axiotron Modbook

Note that I am not connected with Axiotron nor do I own a Macbook

I'll go with "untrue"

[pla]

Apple next year will introduce its own take on the market in the form of a tablet-based device that will sell for $700 or less.

Put simple - Tablets suck except for a very few niche uses... And even for those few uses, netbooks do the job cheaper and more conveniently.

So put simply, I'll consider this a completely bogus rumor, since Apple has better sense than to revive a dying-for-a-good-reason technology. They may have a few failures in trying to predict the next cool toy, but haven't made the mistake of recreating retro hardware since the Lisa.

Now, I mentioned netbooks above - It wouldn't surprise me at all to see Apple try to jump into that market (though they will no doubt ignore the "sub $500" as a defining characteristic of that class of device). Perhaps (though by no means certain) even with a flippable screen, giving users the option of using it in notebook-style or tablet-style mode. But an outright straight-up tablet, not going to happen.

Re:I'll go with "untrue"

[alen]

laptops are becoming the next desktop. tablets and netbooks are nice to carry around with you.

carrying a laptop around is like going out with a baby. you need to take a bag of junk with you. a netbook or a tablet with nice battery life you just throw in your bag that you take with you anyway. and for the millions of people that commute on public transit it will be a nice way to pass the time. bigger screen to read books, better hardware for games, and you may be able to do some work and sync your docs.

what a tablet or netbook needs to do is not have a boot up time. my wife's iphone is always on. if i want 10 minutes of net time i don't want to waste 5 minutes of it waiting for a netbook to boot up

Re:I'll go with "untrue"

[Neil Jansen]

The only reason I can see Apple doing any kind of tablet would be to get in on the eBook market. Just like the App Store, it would integrate directly into iTunes and make them even more money. That's the sort of stuff that fits Apple's style.

Re:I'll go with "untrue"

[tlhIngan]

They didn't create the portable music digital music player. They did create a market for a very sleek-looking higher-end one with its own proprietary locked-in store, which now sells un-DRMed music like everyone else was already using.

Actually, the iPod got to where it is by basically being the right device at the right time:

* Space - it had a lot of it. (Competitors had more, though)
* Size - it had a lot of space for its size (The Creative Nomad was bigger than a contemporary CD player. The iPod was much smaller - slightly thicker than a pack of playing cards). Other MP3 players in the same size had a pitiful handful of songs at best.
* Speed - Parallel port, serial port, USB1.1 suck for filling space. Great if you're only dealing with 128MB of memory, but lousy when you want to actually fill in gigabytes and have it take a reasonable amount of time. Firewire was the only option at the time.
* Market - MP3 players were niche at the moment. MP3-CD players were the item to get, but they're big (see size), and cumbersome (burning a CD... and having huge books of MP3 CDs to pick one to play). Apple got in early and rode the wave as MP3 players started getting mainstream (no doubt helped by Apple's marketing making everyone want one).

Apple released the iPod at the right time with the right combination of features that people wanted - a small player that holds a decent quantity of music that doesn't take all day to transfer. MP3 players were still pretty niche when the iPod was released (MP3s weren't, thanks to Napster, but people were listening via their computers). Apple got in during this time - either by luck or pure business savvy. A few years later and the iPod may have been the next Newton as the market gets flooded with new entrants.

The iTunes store came *MUCH* later (2003-ish or so), by Apple dragging the kicking and screaming music industry into it.

The problem is, netbooks are already mainstream, and the race to the bottom has stopped more or less because the bottom has been reached. Instead, now we see netbooks clamoring for the low-end laptop market with larger screens and higher prices. At best, Apple would be another competitor in the high-end netbook market, but probably not a very worthy one (it *IS* Apple, and they don't have the iPod advantage). Unless Apple comes up with something "must have" that redefines the market (at least that's Apple's strength... finding the few things that make people go "why didn't I think of that"?).

Re:I'll go with "untrue"

[kaizendojo]

Put simple - Tablets suck except for a very few niche uses... And even for those few uses, netbooks do the job cheaper and more conveniently.

Put simple - that's why you're posting on /. instead of working for a company like Apple. They've already proven that tablets - which is what the iPhone essentially is, just in a smaller form factor - don't suck, and millions of consumers agreed. Tablets with a user interface done right, that is. This is not just a move to come up with a cool new toy, this is an acknowledgment of a growing market replete with a built in catalog of available applications that users actually want. And as a bonus, they can expand to users who want a Kindle but expect a but more for their bucks than just a reader. And I'm damn glad, since I put my Dad into the stock early and it's going to be my inheritance some day.

Re:Please stop these non-news rumours

[causality]

Rumours are not news. They belong on Digg. Please please /., try to keep the quality of the post high and avoid speculation like this. It makes the site so much more worth reading.

It was clearly labelled as a rumor: "Apple Tablet Rumors Again (Still?)". If it weren't, I'd have a much easier time seeing your point.

Sure, you could say that the holy absolute purity of the rest of Slashdot is forever tainted by the stain of the word "rumor" in this story but, eh, have you SEEN the rest of Slashdot? I think it'll be alright.

Re:Please stop these non-news rumours

[ChunderDownunder]

Agreed, calling this a rumour is even stretching it a bit. Paraphrasing the article:

Apple bought a chip manufacturer. The iPhone is too small to surf the web and needs a real keyboard. All the cool kids have portables with 10" screens. Wouldn't it be cool if my Macbook had the iPhone's multi-touch input? My Apple shares are idling due to the global financial crisis; I better start some badass rumour to spur on the fanboys. It's Apple, they haven't introduced some magical product for a while now.

Re:Please stop these non-news rumours

[LSU_ADT_Geek]

Please begin metamoderating news submissions in firehose if you don't find the quality of submissions to your liking, but it did bubble its way up because someone else thought it wasn't a bad idea to talk about.

heres a picture of it.

[onionlee]

Here's a picture of it

Re:no way

[cayenne8]

If $700 is a lot of money to you for a tablet sized/functioning computer...then you are not in the demographic that Apple is marketing to.

What the Apple guy told me

[SteveFoerster]

I work for a university, and Apple recently sent a guy to talk to our faculty about the future of technology. During question time I referred to the possibility of a Mac tablet so I could try to gauge his immediate expression. No clue from that, all I had to go on was his response that Apple is obviously aware that people are talking about the possibility of a Mac tablet, and they'll come out with one as soon as they can do a good quality one for less than six hundred bucks.

Of course, he also said our computer labs were obsolete, which was bullshit, so who knows what to believe.

Re:no way

[mabhatter654]

I'm sticking to an extra large iPod Touch. Right now the Touch is a stripped down iPhone and really there's not a lot of reason to buy it. Now that 9-10" 10x6 displays are dirt cheap, now would be the time to build an iPod Touch out of one. It would be bigger, but the Touch electronics and battery are really small.... it would be like the screen of current netbooks. Toss in the standard mini webcam and mic (again practically free now) for taking audio notes and using pictures. They'll be unlocking bluetooth in the gen 2 Touch soon, so for a 10" screen hopefully they'd open up the Apple keyboard for input.

Apple is committed to iPhone and the app store right now. I can't see any device smaller than a Macbook running the desktop OSX. They are also looking to roll their own chips now, so again hitting the low power tablet factor they don't have to share is definitely how they roll.

Re:way

[mabhatter654]

it would be one with apps that are USEFUL and not junk!

Tablet PCs never caught on because there's only 2-3 apps DESIGNED for tablets not made by Microsoft. The majority of apps on tablets in the real world I've seen are just VB programs for data entry with little benefits on a tablet versus a laptop.

Apple has the app store and it has multi-touch apps that all do cool stuff with the hardware... Tablet PC had a 7 year run all by itself and nobody stepped up with the must-have apps. A 10" iPod Touch, with access to all the iPhone/Touch apps existing right now, would take off. Not to mention the new apps that might work on an iPhone but really need more real estate.. like editing photos or web browsing.

Hardware wise, the current Touch probably supports a 10" screen in hardware so it would be really cheap and easy for Apple to release this. Rumor has also been that iPhone OS 3 has support for bigger screens and requires UI resolution independence so apps made for an iPhone or Touch will look correct on bigger screens.