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Steve Jobs, Before the iPad, On Why Tablets Suck
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Edible Apple: "Apple didn't release the first tablet computer or even come up with the idea for tablet computing itself. If anything, Microsoft, and Bill Gates in particular, were championing tablet computers years before the iPad was released. In this video clip from the first All Things D conference in 2003, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs explains to Walt Mossberg why Apple, at the time, wasn't keen on tablets and more specifically, why Jobs felt that stylus computing and handwriting recognition were inherent failures."
What a misdirection? Besides, styluses are for good nose picking.
That was before he accidentally stumbled into the goldmine that was iOS (remember he didn't want to allow any apps at all at first) and his earlier arguments were made moot by a tsunami of cash.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
We all remember what Steve Jobs was saying that Apple had "no plans at the current time to make a tablet." We are now 9 years in the future so it is hardly "the current time" that he was referring to. I know it is fashionable here on Slashdot to make fun of Apple but this time there is nothing to laugh at. He was talking about how tablets suck, not that people won't by them, and quite frankly I can only agree with him.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
Tablets still fail as computers, and I don't think Jobs' ideas about them have changed. But there are a lot of people who can afford $500 as their "third" computer (or now "second" with laptops being powerful enough to be a primary). And Jobs said there was a market for that, it's just a lot bigger than it was 8 years ago.
There's a reason there isn't a keyboard accessory sold by Apple. If you want a keyboard, and you're going to type so much you need one, get a MacBook. Unfortunately, I think that's holding back the desire to get a pressure sensitive stylus added to the interface options on the iPad (well, that and probably a ton of patents held by Wacom), which would expand the usability of a tablet quite a bit.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
That was back before anybody really knew how much money people would throw at a company that makes throwaway electronics with short shelf lives and no user replaceable parts.
I guess this shows you how clear and consistent Steve Jobs' vision has been on this topic?
Bingo. Rather than just port over their desktop OS (hello, Microsoft), Jobs waited until they had developed something that actually worked on a tablet. And yes, I did own a Windows tablet...and no, I don't miss it.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
he's right about handwriting, and keyboards, and email
but email wasn't the killer app
the phone was. when Apple skipped tablets and turned phones into computers (i mean, when it decided Palm's ideas could be slightly improved and packaged in boner-inducing ways), it dived right in.
and email started to decline and texting grew. because texting is just email you can tolerate to write at 2 cps, and was already on phones.
and, interestingly, phone calls have died as well. because the phone-computer idea wasn't about calling people, it was about having that whole package of computing and connectivity in one pocket instead of two or three.
then, once the small-form-factor touchscreen interface device got popular, it was a natural transform to pull on its edges to make it, simply, a bigger version of the same thing. hence we're back to tablets. which aren't notebooks without keyboards; they're smartphones with extra spatial extent.
and i doubt that jobs saw this coming in 2003. all he saw was that tabletized notebooks were bollocks. which they were.
Get your facts straight. Misc comments on styluses and handwriting aside, Apple fellow Alan Kay came up with the first known concept design for the tablet back in the 1960's with the Dynabook. At the time he was working for Xerox PARC, the facility's researchers came up with the first Windowed Graphical User Interface and the first Ethernet controllers. Granted Apple ripped them off mercilessly for the original Mac design, but Xerox signed a released that allowed them to have it. Go figure. Ironically the Xerox Star (prototype of the Apple Lisa, forerunner to the Mac) was the smallest version of a dynabook possible back in early 70's. In any case, Bill Gates was not a player in this game beyond creating a hackneyed attempt. Much earlier attempts were made in micro-sized PDAs from all fronts. Wake up and smell what you're shoveling.
The user interface is more compact on a cellphone, not bloated like on a PC. A fortuitous discovery Steve probably made after 2003.
The real failure of tablet computers was not as simple as "hurr durr they used a stylus." Desktop OSes are still designed for computers with keyboards; the mouse is only useful for launching programs and using files created by others. When it comes to writing an email, chatting, etc., the keyboard is still king; Steve Jobs was right on, and the truth of his statements has not changed. Modern tablets are winning because they run software that was designed to be far more graphical and "consumption oriented" -- a physical keyboard is not terribly important, and the software keyboard that is available is "good enough" for what people use their tablets for.
Palm trees and 8
Microsoft doesn't deserve much credit, either. Microsoft was thought to be late to the tablet party. Conceptually, the credit should go to Alan Kay for the "Dynabook." The 1989 GRiDpad was the first real product, and there was an immense amount of buzz around GO! Computing's 1992 PenPoint. Microsoft really just genned up "Windows for Pen Computing" as a sort of me-too response to PenPoint. Wang Labs had something called "Guide" (after the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) which got lost in the collapse of the company; the people working on it went on to found a company called, if memory serves me, Arthur Dent, but I don't know what happened to it.
Apple deserves credit for the iPad in much the same way as it deserves credit for the GUI... and Edison deserves credit for the electric light, and the Wright Brothers deserve credit for the airplane. None of them really "invented" these things, none of them were really the first, and most of the technology was in the air waiting to be commercialized. But in each case they were the first to make it to market with something that didn't suck--with a finished, usable, "perfected"--to use an old-fashioned word--product.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Microsoft and Gates' vision of tablet computing back then was a full desktop operating system with a stylus and handwriting recognition.
Steve Jobs pointed out in 2003 that even done very, very well, handwriting recognition still sucks.
The iPhone, a mini tablet released in 2007, had an operating system built ground up with a touch interface (no stylus), and when it came to text input it popped up an on-screen keyboard (no handwriting recognition).
The article closes with Jobs acknowledging that tablets would be good for reading articles (I saw a project on hack-a-day where someone built an iPad bracket into their kitchen so they could read recipes), and joking that tablets are a niche market.
Microsoft's tablet efforts in 2003 were worse than niche market, they were failures. Apple blew the market wide open by not following the same path.
The problem is that the "stylus" and the "keyboard" are two different markets, and you can't serve both of them properly.
I come from the art community, one of the bitching points about the iPad is that the capacitive screen makes it completely unusable for drawing any more fine than fingerpainting.
The flip side is that the on-screen keyboard eats too much of the screen real estate. So the tablet is NOT a desktop replacement, but there is no reason why it can't do either of these better. The iPad can be used with a bluetooth keyboard, that solves one problem, what about the desire to make it graphics-tabletly? Wacom. Wacom owns the patents to every useful graphics-tablet system. And they are expensive. The latest think Wacom has released is the Inkling, essentially a blackbox that you clip to any writing surface, and a pressure sensitive ballpoint pen. Great idea! That proves you can make something small and portable that could be paired with the iPad... only it's not iPad compatible. Maybe next year.
Apple knows the average person doesn't want to add 200$ to the device to make it a real graphics tablet "tablet", but wacom's older patents are due to run out any time now and they could full well include something built into the screen to allow special lightweight stylus's to be used on a higher resolution model.
Like, the super-gadget version should have a keyboard and digitizer stylus, but neither of these are necessary for the vast majority of what the current iPad model is used for... video, books and websites. multitouch/stylus/gyro games are very limited (in fact most PC games from Japan would work nicely on the iPad if they weren't all pr0n.)
Handwriting is still an inferior input mechanism to keyboards...
That's true in most situations, but I strongly feel that it's wrong for note-taking. I've been a grad student for a while -- I've taken a lot of classes. And I've tried the "type notes" thing on a few occasions, and never really liked it. Why? Because while the keyboard is the best device out there at generating text, there's a crapload of stuff that is useful to put into notes that isn't text. A keyboard is awful at diagrams. (Unless you've got an hour to lay it out with PGF/Tikz or something.) An actual mouse would be okay but not great, and the mouse-replacements you get with laptops were bad.
I always went back to pencil and paper because it was the superior input mechanism.
I got a tablet after a year or two in grad school, and it was absolutely excellent for class note taking. In some ways it wasn't quite as nice as paper, but it made up for it in searchability and such. (A little contrary to what Jobs says, MS's handwriting recognition is decent in general and excellent in OneNote. (I might be wrong, but I have some evidence that I think strongly suggests that OneNote's is really good because it doesn't have to commit to any one interpretation. If you search for 'foo' then search for 'bar', and you have a squiggle that looks a bit like each, it can point you at it in both cases. It is much worse if you actually do a handwriting->text conversion.))
If I didn't stop taking classes a year or so after getting the tablet, I have no doubt that I would have continued using it. It's way better.
That being said, it's probably less of a boon in something like a corporate meeting scenario, and "students taking classes" is a relatively nitche and pretty poor overall population -- even if tablets work great in it.
(Yes, I know that some people use laptops to take notes by typing. Most of them don't -- even though they own them. I think that says something. And like I said, I hated it.)
Do you think the Windows Tablet edition of XP would have dominated the market had they made their GUI better? The tablets of the era needed a stylus because every tablet I ever saw was running a high resolution screen with the stock GUI, meaning teeny-tiny little "dropdown" buttons, scroll bars, etc. But they could run any Windows program without modification. They didn't sell. Even if the OS had been fully optimized for tablets (it never was,) nobody cared that they could run a teeny-tiny screen version of Excel, because they still expected full desktop usability out of them.
As you said, Apple broke backward compatibility from day zero, and told everyone "No, you will NOT get a desktop experience from this machine. Only custom-written, Apple-blessed-and-approved iPhone-specific apps will run on our devices." Microsoft even tried that approach early on with WinCE, but they found only a few dozen embedded customers (printers, etc.,), got it installed on a few crappy slow phones that served mostly to embarrass them with their awful performance, and the marketplace really didn't care at all. For $(DEITY)'s sake, they were so bad that the crappy Nokia phones outsold WinCE phones! By trying to accommodate multi-platform software, Microsoft failed on all platforms.
Microsoft may even have been the ground-breakers here, showing the world that a small device could have great potential, while providing a rich list of mistakes to avoid making. Apple learned those lessons much better than Microsoft.
John
Using a docked ASUS Transformer gives you the best of both worlds. You can use the touch screen or the keyboard touchpad/mouse for whatever works best. It gets very comfortable very quickly mixing them together.
I find myself getting frustrated when I go back to using a "normal" laptop or desktop computer - many times I've tried to touch or swipe something on screen and gotten stalled wondering why it wasn't reacting. I realize that there are some all-in-one units out there already sporting touch screens, but here's me hoping that all laptops and desktops will have touch screens as standard in the near future.