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Why Everyone Has High Hopes For Apple Tablet
waderoush writes "The deafening roar of anticipation around Apple's expected 'iSlate' announcement on January 27 is strange, to say the least, given the public's utter apathy about tablet computers to date. What's going on? Xconomy's analysis makes three points. 1) Previous tablet makers have shown little imagination around UIs and how a touchscreen changes things. 2) With the iPhone, Apple has shown what's possible in this regard. 3) There's latent demand for a mobile computing device that's smaller and lighter than a laptop but has more screen real estate than a smartphone — something reminiscent of a Star Trek tricorder or PADD. Hence the hopes for the iSlate — which are so high that it may be difficult for even Apple to meet them."
Photoshop.
Mac is still, and long will be the favorite computer of most graphicians/artists.
Tablet+screen has some serious disadvantages. You draw in one place, image appears elsewhere.
With a good touchscreen capable of providing precision comparable to decent Wacoms, this can become a dream tool for an artist.
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"the deafening roar of anticipation" I'm in Australia right, a moderately wealthy fairly technologically developed nation. We're no Japan, but we're no Sudan either. No one I talk to gives a crap about this. My friend is doing a graphic arts diploma and he doesnt even know anyone who cares about this. It will come, if it is good some people will like it. Apple is not a religion, they are a technology company. GTFO with your fake hype.
There's latent demand for a mobile computing device that's smaller and lighter than a laptop but has more screen real estate than a smartphone...
Nothing latent about it - this is _EXACTLY_ what I'm interested in seeing. While I would love a high end Mac laptop (among many other tech toys), I really just want an iPhone/iPod Touch on steroids and, from what I'd imagine, the "iTablet" (or whatever it will be called) will almost certainly fit that bill perfectly. The fact that it's from Apple and will surely have some additional surprises along the way is just icing on the cake.
Of course, time will tell if they deliver what I am looking for, but I suspect it'll be another damn cool piece of tech that I try to find a justification to buy.
If the netbook and smartphone markets are any indication of the potential number of sales that exist out there, then I would wager even competitors hope Apple's tablet takes off. Because it's been shown time and time again that once Apple establishes via ads and quality that it's cool to own an iPod Nano or an iPhone or i-Whatever then the competitors step in and scoop up the very large market of people that want a product like it for less. They're not even knockoffs per se but I would bet that on the whole MP3 player manufacturers like iRiver enjoyed unseen benefits from Apple popularizing the MP3 player. The same might be said of the many cheaper smartphones that followed the iPhone--they were there but not 'accepted' as a necessary commodity for a consumer.
I don't mean to sound like a fanboy but the competitors that have been waiting to market tablet PCs now have the luxury of waiting for Apple to either make a brilliant move or blunder (an expensive wager) and then step in to enjoy the market that Apple works to establish with tablet PCs. The great part is that there are so many consumers that will gladly take a second rate device for cheaper money and in their mind think that they not only got a deal but now are keeping up with Joneses who all have iSlates or iTablets or whatever the devil Apple may hold. I actually think it benefits both Microsoft and Apple for them to release their products in tandem. It adds to the rivalry and people love that. Not to mention, they're certainly going to be compatible with only their respective products so a long time Mac user isn't going to be stolen nor will a longtime Windows user go over to the iSlate.
My work here is dung.
The iPhone is a nifty idea with the accelerometer and the gps and the multi-touch.
However, it's locked in a phone form factor that is very limiting.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
For all the bitching and moaning that a lot of the Slashdot crowd does about Apple and how overhyped/overrated/overpriced/over-everything their products are, I think most would have to grudgingly agree that Apple has driven innovation in the marketplace. This is a story that has been repeated a number of times:
1) A class of product exists in the marketplace, but has only received lukewarm adoption for a variety of reasons.
2) Apple enters the market with their own device, which has a bunch of features that may or may not have been seen in other devices, but on the whole is a very well integrated package. Somehow, they saw a way to make the product work.
3) Consumers see Apple's product, like it, want it, and buy it in large numbers.
4) Profit for Apple.
5) Competitors see Apple's success in that market segment and begin to rush in with their own products. Some are just copycats: adding or removing a feature or two from Apple's benchmark. The smart ones see what made Apple's product a hit, absorb the new technological paradigm, and introduce their own innovative take on it.
6) Consumers see the competitor products, like (some of) them, want(some of) them, and buy (some of) them in large numbers.
7) Profit for competitors, maybe.
8) Profit (continuing) for Apple, maybe.
9) Consumers have many choices or amazing gee whiz products that are vastly superior to what existed before Apple's entry into the marketplace. Win.
It certainly doesn't always happen this way. But it has happened often enough.
The reason I want a tablet computer is that that I can write on it with a stylus like a pencil, and take notes, including sketches and mathematical and engineering symbols, on what is essentially a limitless notebook, and on top of this I can annotate my notes with audio, video, and hyperlinks.
And on top of this I would like to store my textbooks in it.
I could go to school with one single item.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Yep. I've been hoping it will be affordable, say $300...$500 or so. I've also been hoping it'll be a wifi/bluethooth machine, not a cellphone machine, as cell companies are notorious for overcharging for bandwidth (and generally lousy at providing it.) I don't think it can balance long battery life with the desired form factor and power requirements if it's a full bore OS X machine, so I anticipate an iPod-like design, that is, one app at a time, not much CPU power, CPU and GPU mostly asleep, or you get battery life measured in very few hours. I don't really mind that idea though... I've got an iPod touch and I am most impressed with what it can do under those same constraints.
Still, the price and communications issues loom large in my mind, and I'm feeling more than a little cynical. I'm sure, knowing Apple, that the thing will be beautiful and desirable, but Apple's been known to make fairly large mis-steps before in other areas (camera in the nano, not the Touch; Apple TV; Newton; one-button mouse; etc) and this may simply be another.
We'll know soon enough.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
For this new tablet to succeed, it will need to be lighter, yet allow people to install third party applications.
This could hang it, I think.
If I'm right, and the buzz sort of supports this, then it will be a larger iPod. That means your only hope of getting new software on the thing will be the Apple store. And while there are a lot of apps out there, those certainly do not encompass the entirety of what I'd want ever want to do with a computer. Which is okay now, because an iPod is clearly not a computer. But if this new device blurs the line too far away from 'throwaway gadget' to 'computer' Apple may run into trouble.
What would you use it for?
Movies, as you mentioned. Or games.
A web browser that has no keyboard
There exist web browsing use cases that need no keyboard, but you don't see these if your web use clusters around posting on forums and editing wikis.
and likely is only useable in your house where you (presumably) have a desktop/laptop.
Unless the device has either a SIM or CSIM slot or a USB port for an external 3G radio. Or unless someone else in the house is using the desktop/laptop. Or unless you're at a public hotspot.
Actually, everything I do for my job - software engineering for the Solaris platform - is done on my Mac laptop. The only exception is Outlook, for which I switch the KVM over to the company supplied PC.
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
Edit a complex video? what huge advantage does portability and low power consumption bring to video editing?
What we need is something with a decent interface, USB ports, and tons of free software. The USB ports must be there so you can hook up a keyboard. TFA is wrong: virtual keyboards still suck, and will suck. Handwriting recognition cannot be fast and accurate without retraining the writer. Voice recognition is cute, but for most people cannot be the basis for a sustained interface: unless you have a compelling need to use your voice, it's usually slower than typing, far less accurate, unwieldy to edit, cognitively consuming (as you must concentrate on the screen transcribing your spoken words), and socially awkward (until, at least, the computer talks back).
So if the task requires extensive texual input, it's going to require a real keyboard. What are the odds that Apple's 1G tablet will have a USB port that works in host mode, or a non-proprietary accessories connector?
As a tablet user for two and a half years, I have an idea what they're useful for: a helluva lot. Every task where a computer can help, but isn't the focus of the activity works better with a tablet. Every task where a computer is too heavy, or has too awkward power requirements works better with a tablet.
Every task that works better with some other portable gadget is not for a tablet. You want a phone -- get a phone. You want a camera -- get a camera (now, a decent webcam that works with * and Skype is a different story). Windows 7 ain't gonna fly here: a tablet needs to be instant-on, and low, low power (think ARM). So, maybe the iSlate will take off; hopefully someone else will succeed in selling something better. But the market will soon explode with every variant.
Maybe turtleneck universe, but when I was working in printing (which is really part of the design world) we had Macs (G4's and the like - really ancient stuff), the vast vast vast majority of all the machines used in production were Windows machines. Reason? Cost - pure and simple.
The sad reality is that all these once niche apps run on Windows and Mac these days and they generally run faster on Windows - not because Macs are slow, but Apple generally have a lot longer hardware upgrade window for some reason.
Case in point: the fastest Mac's money can buy are Core 2 based 3 GHz machines where you can already get i7's and AMD systems on the PC side that are faster and more efficient at the same clock speeds for less money than Apple is selling their stuff - and i7's have been out since last year.
if it's anything like the original tricorder it looks like it will weigh 40 pounds and have a 4" screen and no usb ports. Now if apple can come up with one of those medical scanner thingies instead - that would be a great deal.
Nullius in verba
Is there a point you wanted to make without a strawman? I didn't say that all phones had stupid restrictions. I would, however, go so far as to say that devices without stupid restrictions were not available by the carriers in my region at the time, and so you're free to rail against me for living in the "right place" back then...if you really must.
My point was to counter the notion that the industry was not already "turned back" before Apple entered the market. The grandparent is propagating a fiction that the industry was somehow open until the iPhone singlehandedly closed it.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
BTW, the iPhone and Touch are starting to become gaming platforms. Maybe the tablet will ramp up that capability.
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One thing that really annoyed me in school was professors who would actually yell at students who took notes, because they felt that all the information they needed was in the powerpoint slides they made available, and they should just focus on what the prof was saying. This completely ignores the fact that note taking is not just for writing down information to be read later, it helps you memorize that information as you are doing it. Passively hearing a lecture will let me absorb say 30% of the lecture after a few days. The interactive process of taking notes makes me think about what is being said more intently, and increases not only my retention but understanding.
At the time, I thought I was just stuck in old fashioned habits. But I now realize that the lack of note taking was a big reason why I struggled in some of my CS courses. I would really like to go back and beat some of those professors with a clue stick.
Sure maybe it's not that hard to use a second hand and it's not THAT big of a deal but why stick with it at all? What's the benefit of using two hands for an operation that only takes one on a proper mouse?
Why stop there, why not have 5 button mice as standard? It's because the concept of right and left click, and the subtle distinctions in use and result between them, make for a confusing user interface, which Apple chose to eschew in favour of something simpler. As it happens, recent mice from Apple allow for right clicking (if you must), along with scrolling gestures, zoom gestures etc, etc.
The only reason people on Windows get so hung up on having to use the control key is that Windows apps have ended up putting just about everything in a contextual menu, so it's necessary (or at least easier than the alternatives) to right click about a hundred times a day, and many people I know get by almost entirely choosing stuff from the menu that pops up when you right click. Having two buttons and using them in this way is one manner of doing things, and it may be the way you're used to, but that doesn't make it the best.
Many of the things that we take for granted in computer interfaces are in fact cruft from previous software or are simply there because 'that's the way we've always done it'. Things like two button mice, double click versus single click, right click to get a menu, command shortcuts, folders versus files, etc etc are all concepts which confuse the hell out of beginner computer users, and frankly most of them are concepts which just aren't required. I've seen many people furiously double clicking everything, even links on the web, because the distinctions between double clicking and single clicking really aren't that obvious or well thought out - often they're simply arbitrary.
It's interesting that in their latest OS - Mobile OS X (which I suspect Jobs sees as completely replacing Mac OS at some point), Apple have thrown out almost all the stuff we take for granted and started anew. I'd say iPhone OS is therefore a lot easier to use, as it doesn't rely on double clicks, right clicks, etc. The only thing they've really fucked up is the copy/paste behaviour, which was a difficult problem, but is not intuitive enough if you ask me. Mobile OS X doesn't have windows, menus, desktops, folders, contextual menus, window widgets, documents folders, etc. etc. Some things have been lost in that transition, but remarkably little - it's still pretty full featured from a user's point of view.
This is what makes their forthcoming tablet so interesting; how will they take Mobile OS X on a step, and scale it up to a size approaching that of small laptops? It's also what makes the HP slate announced by Ballmer so stultifying; we've seen that sort of bodged attempt to port a desktop OS to a new form factor before, and it didn't work in 2001 when Gates tried it first.
As to right clicking on a mouse, I can't say I miss it on my iPhone, and I wouldn't miss it on a desktop OS, so long as a more intuitive way of interacting with the machine replaced it - it's a stupid idea that belongs in the past. I'd like to see more ideas dropped and refined on desktop OSs, and this sort of attitude of 'we must have everything as it was before' is exactly what keeps us with the uninteresting and unproductive interfaces we've seen dominate the desktop for the past 20 years. If people had that attitude back when the mouse was introduced, perhaps we'd all still be chording 5 key combos instead of clicking on icons.
I'm soooo tired of the multi-versus-one-button mouse debate. Apple debuted the very first commercial, widely available mouse. They chose to have one button over however many the original Xerox PARC mouse had for a very good reason. Getting people to reach out and move a mouse and push a button was a HUGE paradigm shift. If you weren't there and don't remember this era, you don't get an opinion, BTW. :-) Anyway, it was an extremely valid design choice for the first macs. It does seem that Apple stuck to this for WAY too long, refusing to even offer a multi-button option of their own. But, there is something to be said for the design from the point of view of first-time users, even into the 90s. Remember, a lot of people were buying their FIRST computer in these decades.
Ok, so, now apple ships multi-button mice. And I will STILL replace them with 8-button logitech devices. But my grandmother won't. Lowest common denominator, people. Now, if Apple would just give me a multitouch pad for my computer....
Can we please never speak of Apple and one-button mice again? Please?
You must be at least 35 years old to have an opinion on this subject.