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Apple Tablet Rumor Wrap Up
Since the Apple event is this afternoon, and the submission bin overflows with Apple Tablet rumor stories, I'm putting up a few of the more choice links here so we can all speculate for the next few hours. A McGraw Hill CEO confirmed the tablet on CNBC last night, basically saying it is a big iPhone that has content agreements with publishers. Another blogger wrote in with a expectation list for the event, and technologizer had a nice history of fail in the world of tablet computing. Feel free to add your own rumor, speculation, and exhausted eye rolling below.
Correction: Apple at least rethinks usability properly.
Microsoft bungs hundreds of millions at "usability" & we end up with the stupid ribbon... Pah!
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
I just don't care much for all this speculation and rumors. Waste of time in my book. Wait for the device to come out and judge it on its merits.
That and lack of flash support, love it or hate it, a lot of sites have yet to upgrade to html5 for video, so we are stuck with flash. Unless Apple has struck a deal with Adobe to allow flash on the tablet, there are going to be a lot of web sites that aren't accessible from the tablet.
Monstar L
An Apple tablet would certainly be bad news for them; but they might have a future among people who want OSX in tablet form.
Unless Steve Jobs accidentally mind-melds with Richard Stallman in the next hour or so, the tablet is almost certainly going to be a hard-locked app-store only product. Further, the odds that it is x86 are somewhere between slim and none, and slim is bleeding to death.
If most of Axiotron's customers were more or less casual users who just had to have an Apple tablet for some reason, they are completely fucked. If, though, they are substantially people who want to be able to draw directly on the screen in photoshop, or otherwise do full OSX stuff in tablet form, they might survive.
Microsoft bungs hundreds of millions at "usability" & we end up with the stupid ribbon
I'm not convinced that "the stupid ribbon" is the best example of your thesis. Perhaps it is easier for novices to learn a program's tabbed toolbar than a program's menu bar. For one thing, recasting a pull-down menu as a toolbar keeps a class of actions on the screen where the user can see them rather than overlapping the document and disappearing once the user chooses an action. As I understand it, most of the whining about Ribbon came from 1. people who rely on muscle memory from previous versions of the product, the same sort of people who would get confused between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org anyway, and 2. people concerned about the legal fees of putting up prior art from 2002 to invalidate the patents that Microsoft engineers were applying for over tabbed toolbars. Sure, Ribbon has room for improvement, but it took a couple iterations for Apple to get pull-down menus right too.
But Im not willing to pay $800-$1500 or whatever the tablet costs for the privilege of casual couch surfing.
Then don't. This product isn't for you. Why is it when ever Apple does *anything* Slashdot takes it as a personal affront? The iPod (lame), the iPhone (better Smartphones exist), the newest MacBook Pros (No Express Card slot), The built in batteries, etc. Apple, or any other company, isn't forcing you to do anything.
When McLaren or Maybach come out with new cars do you all complain that they're over priced and don't appeal to you? Why do you do it with computers?
Sort of reminds me of this xkcd. Fine, the Apple tablet doesn't appeal to you, why even bother making a comment?
Microsoft just throws Windows on the device complete with all the crappy desktop metaphors and UI widgets that are completely irrelevant to the new form factor -- witness Windows Mobile and all the Windows tablets. Apple at least rethinks usability.
Apple at least thinks about usability. When's the last time that MS did that? I can tell you: Just prior to the launch of Win95, after even the final user testing showed that this "start button" concept is stupid, dumb, user-unfriendly and counterintuitive. They finally put the "Start" label on it (it was just the windos logo before that, yes a straight copy from the Apple logo on the Apple menu bar, except that that's always been on the menu bar where users expect menu things to be) and then added the "click here to start" animation when you first launch the OS, because even the label wasn't enough.
That's how MS thinks about "usability". Explains a lot about the trainwreck that every new windos edition adds to, doesn't it?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Lock-in. Ten years ago, would anyone have predicted that products like the iPhone or the Kindle could possibly have any success at all? Back then, it looked like there was a trend toward more freedom, and new products would be competing to be more open and usable than one another.
Somehow, in the last decade, the personal computer market has accepted (in the sense of people actually spend money on some of the products) that personal computers don't need to be totally open to developers; that personal computers can use the same development model as video game consoles, and some people (maybe a minority, but a big enough niche to make a profit and get a SHITLOAD of publicity) will actually buy them.
So what's new here? Well, look at the tablets of the past: they were programmable by the Little People. They were personal computers in the old sense, where when you bought one, you totally owned it, and you could even start a software business on one if you wanted to, with no limits to what you could do. Not this time. This time it's going to be closed up, have a centralized app store that only sells approved products, and yet people are considering it newsworthy and even predict some success.
This isn't some obscure wackjob company that you can safely laugh at by default when they try to commit atrocities against hackers; it's Apple. The atrocities are there, but not the laughter. The mockery will be there, but tinged with a very real feeling of fear and bitterness. This fucking piece of shit just might still be in the news the day after tomorrow. And that's sobering. We're nearing the end of the personal computer revolution that took off about 3 decades ago. We're seeing Apple destroy something that they played such an important part in creating. That's news. First it was the handheld, now it's something bigger. In a few years: the desktop?
Why would anyone want to?
Translation:
Apple fanboy sees all negative observations as complaints, and ends his post with a question where he is wondering why anyone would ever publicly make negative observations about Apple or Apple Products.
"His name was James Damore."
Lock-in. MS Office is pervasive in schools and in business, and a drastically different interface makes it harder for users to shift. True, for a short term the Ribbon is pushing some users who have the choice away from MS Office, but I think that MS are planning to ride that out and by agressive deals with schools, colleges, governments, etc get people locked in.
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I think using a LED / LCD screen for book reading is going to put a little more strain on the eyes then e-ink display. Which might make it not suitable for a good amount of people. If being doubled as e-reader is the major selling point, this is likely to be too expensive to count. Of course, Apple have a few years to let this go. We will see.
Do you really think the ribbon was anything to do with usability?
Maybe patents had something to do with it, but it is classic Microsoft usability. It takes a cohesive, existing system, and layers on top an additional UI element that they hope will make all of the other UI elements make sense. Microsoft rarely removes elements.
It's like Windows 7 filesharing. Not only did they keep the old Samba based filesharing, but they added an additional type of filesharing on top. Now you have the joys of setting all of the permissions twice, only now you don't really know which goes to which.
Or the godawful and inconsistent side panels. Why you'd want a system-level UI element taking up that much room just to offer to print photos for you is anybody's guess. But the side panels simply replicate functionality that can be achieved by right-clicking, double clicking, going to the menus, option clicking, or sometimes multiples of the above.
Or for that matter, Word: where each separate program module has its own interface elements. This is true whether those interface elements would make sense elsewhere, or replicate other functions / settings within the application. Or are just legacy and don't really matter anymore.
Apple, on the other hand, actually streamlines. They removed the disk drive, removed the com and serial ports. When spotlight became the way to search in OSX, they removed the other ways to search. Instead of just trying to add, so as not to upset old users, they actively redesign the whole system to be usable as a whole. While I have low hopes for the tablet as a piece of hardware, I'm excited to see the interface conventions it comes up with.
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