Some iTablet Nonsense & And Some iTablet News

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Categorized | Announcements & News

Tags : Apple, Apple iPhone, Rumors and Speculation, Ultra Portable Tablets

Some iTablet Nonsense & And Some iTablet News

Posted on 26 October 2009 by Dan Cohen

Seriously, bloggers need to stop making nonsense go viral. If we ever want to get the kind of respect that ought to come with the hard work and lousy pay (most of us do this as a fun volunteer activity), we need to stop pulling the kind of iTablet nonsense that flew today. New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller used one word, and the internet went wild. He said…

I’m hoping we can get the newsroom more actively involved in the challenge of delivering our best journalism in the form of Times Reader, iPhone apps, WAP or the impending Apple slate or whatever comes after that.

And with that numerous blogs went wild. “OMG! he mentioned the iTablet… and he used the word IMPENDING… He MUST know something.”

DUH! There is little doubt Apple is working on such a device, little doubt Apple and the New York Times have been meeting to discuss plans and, knowing Apple, little doubt the New York Times has as few details as possible.

In fact I KNOW they have been discussing it because I have a legit source close to the discussion who would know exactly what is going on, and this person knows… nothing. I have been told the exact same thing for some time now, and when I pushed yet again today this is what I got..

They don’t actually know what Apple might or might not be working on. They ASSUME there is something, but they do not have any specifics. As a result they are focused on designing a number of different concepts so that when/if a new device is announced they can move quickly to get a delivery system in place as fast as possible.

In other words… Keller didn’t reveal ANYTHING! NOTHING! NADA! ZILCH! KLUM!

Yet people went crazy! Don’t believe me? Just Google “Apple, New York Times and Meetings” and you will see what I mean. Seriously, post after post after post. And all of it nonsense.

I’m assuming we will see a tablet in the next months, but this didn’t advance the issue one bit.

There was, however one bit of news regarding that iTablet that IS worth something…

According to 9to5 Mac, a new study suggests that if Apple wants to make a splash with a tablet they will need to price it a bit more aggressively than the current wisdom seems to suggest they are actually planning.

via 9to5 Mac

We all know that hardcore Apple fans will be getting a tablet if at all humanly possible, regardless of the price. We also assume that Apple fans will pay a premium to have one- they just might have to think about it a bit first.

If Apple wants to win over tried and true PC users, however, the new study suggests the Tablet will need to be priced at or below $600. And considering the actual price of a non-subsidized iPhone, that is going to be a pretty tough number to hit.

Does it matter if Apple reaches into the PC-user base with the tablet? I think so. After all, how many of us who are now Mac-believers got our first taste of OSX on the first gen iPhone, and made our way to MacBooks and iMacs from there? The iPhone and iPod touch are the fastest growing platform in history and are gateway devices to other Mac products. If the Mac Tablet is going to succeed where the PC tablet did not, it is going to need far greater adoption than the current fan-boy base can offer. And according to this study, a price above $600 will make that more than a bit of a challenge.

This post was written by:

Dan Cohen - who has written 2791 posts on Gear Diary.

Having a father who was heavily involved in early laser and fiber-optical research, Dan grew up surrounded by technology and gadgets. Dan’s father brought home one of the very first video games when he was young and Dan remembers seeing a “pre-release” touchtone phone. (When he asked his father what the “#” and “*” buttons were his dad said, “Some day, far in the future, we’ll have some use for them.”) Technology seemed to be in Dan’s blood but at some point he took a different path and ended up in the clergy. His passion for technology and gadgets never left him. +Dan Cohen

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Haesslich
I’ve commented on this elsewhere, especially with regards to the past and some of the reasons why PC tablets have failed to really make a splash in the market outside of very limited applications (and even then, I barely see them). Price for performance was always a big factor, on top of an OS which wasn’t optimized for the tablet experience; the need to always hit Windows-like menus, going through Windows menu bars, and closing things out using the same Windows ‘X’ button meant that you would always encounter some niggling annoyance when working with the tablet… and on top of it being horribly expensive for what you got, would usually send people away from such devices.
The iPhone OS really ‘gets’ the notions behind portable computing in a way no other Microsoft OS has done to date – it’s fairly easy to use, the interface isn’t designed around a stylus or some other small pointy thing which can get lost, it supports what many would consider to be natural gestures (scrolling up faster by moving your fingers faster, zooming by tapping or trying to expand the window with your fingertips and thumb, having menus which don’t require a lot of dexterity with a stylus to hit, not having 50 pages of drop-down menus to access features when you can have a simple on/off switch on a page of options), and is powering one of the most used PDA’s to date.
My main concern now is that Apple will price itself out of the market… building on Microsoft’s mistakes rather than capitalizing on its own strengths and MS’s failures to create another niche in the mobile computing world the way they did with the iPhone OS and the iPhone/iPod Touch. That, and instead of building on the legacy of (semi) open computing as on the Mac, will go the route of locking down the tablet Mac even more than they have the iPod and iPhone in the name of ‘unifying the customer experience’… and by doing so, keep suppliers of various bits of software which could do well on a tablet (I’m thinking of people who need instant access to records, doctors, etc) out by making it prohibitively expensive to develop for or to acquire.
Dan Cohen
Haesslich- Great comment thanks! I used XP Tablets for years and never fully understood why they didn’t get more of a reception than they did. Even with all the issues you listed (totally agree) I still loved using a tablet. Now I am using a Livescribe Pulsepen and while it isn’t the same thing it does give me enough of the note taking ability to stop me from longing for my tablet on a daily basis.
Like you I hope Apple doesn’t price itself out of the market. At the right price point it will be a huge hit and FINALLY bring large tablets to the mainstream.
sherlock
Hi,
“the impending Apple slate”
I took this as meaning impending slate of products, nothing specific.
It could very well have said “Microsoft slate” and not gotten any press but being that Apple was mentioned and the press and all the Apple people jumped in and threw a whole new meaning that was not meant.
Simply ridiculous.
Haesslich
Dan: It was basically a crippled Windows box which didn’t have good enough hardware to run the Windows programs it could run otherwise, didn’t have the battery life of a PDA, and was heavy. The most successful tablets I recall were all tablet/laptop convertibles. The stylus took the place of the mouse, but it couldn’t take the place of a keyboard which, combined with the lack of a very good handwriting recognition protocol (early examples were, IIRC, compared unfavorably with the Newton, which itself wasn’t exactly the best at ‘reading’ handwriting). Between this and the whole ‘stylus as mouse’, it wasn’t a revolution in computing.. and to be honest, why would you want a tablet when a less-expensive and more capable notebook could do most of the same things?
Especially not when the tablets were going at $3000-$3500 a pop when laptops with double the RAM and hard drive, along with similar or better battery life, were available for about $2500 if not less… and even with the drop in Macbook pricing in the past year, I’m afraid any Apple tablet will look at the ‘premium’ market and decide the rest of it isn’t worth pursuing, as they did in past years. Part of what Apple fans like is the feeling that their machines are more ‘exclusive’ due to their higher prices and more standardized hardware from a single source, which guarantees better driver support for the base units (and less driver support for accessories), without the driver nightmare which was with Windows all the way up until XP SP2 or thereabouts.
Want to bet that the Apple tablet, if it shows up, will be retailing for about the same price as a 17″ MacBook Pro? Sorta like how the first iPod Touch 8GB and 16GB units were about the same price as a high-end iPod Classic (100GB)?
Haesslich
Heck, look at Windows Mobile which hasn’t really fundamentally CHANGED in about 10 years: Windows CE looks much like Pocket PC 2000, which looked like PocketPC 2002 which became Windows Mobile 2003, which begat Windows Mobile 5, which spawned WM6 (eventually). The interface has gained a few more colors, but is basically the same as it used to be… right down to the stylus-driven menus which were inherited from Windows CE’s interface, which could’ve come straight from Windows 95, with the exception of the bottom-left and bottom-right menus which got added in WM5, that owe more to the introduction of WM5 to the smartphone market (and the dumbphones which had similar menus for years) than any real advance in concept. Windows in a handheld computing situation has suffered from a fixation on the Windows Desktop as the be-all and end-all of interfaces, which meant they attempted to adapt the desktop experience to the mobile world, rather than try to create something which was easier to use… which is why Palm ate their lunch to start in the PDA world, before it metastasized and suffered the death of irrelevancy as other mobile OS’s advanced in capability and the platforms became more powerful, while Palm and Windows Mobile stayed exactly the same… until the market had moved past them with more specialized devices which came with their own purpose-designed servers (Blackberry), more configurable (and cheaper) ones (Symbian, the failed Java-based phones), or feature phones which were still ‘dumb’ phones at heart (camera phones, music phones).
Then we drag in the iPhone OS, which is sort of a mix between a ‘dumb’ phone and a ‘smart’ one… and here we are.
Haesslich
“or feature phones which were still ‘dumb’ phones at heart (camera phones, music phones) but which could do many of the things that Palm or WM-based phones could, but without the hefty price tag attached to WM-based or Palm-based smartphones or PDA’s. And Windows Mobile 6.5 is STILL stylus-centric, despite the best efforts of manufacturers to try to catch up with people who may not have the time (or elbow room) to whip out a stylus to interact with 20 drop-down or roll-up menus… while Windows Mobile 7 is god knows how many years away, and marginalization is becoming an ever-increasing danger as it loses more and more mindshare to other OSes, and it is looking less revolutionary and more like it’ll be obsolete even before it gets to the RC stage, much less the market.”
Forgot that last bit.
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doogald
How shocking – people want devices to be cheap. I assume that Apple will price this impending device (heh) in a way that maximizes their profit, regardless of market share. In other words, they will care less about pricing it right for mass adoption by cheap users and instead will focus on getting it priced in a way that gets enough adoption at as much profit as possible.
I’m sure that if Apple had done a similar survey before the release of the iPhone they would have received a similar result. They priced it at $500/$600 and still got huge lines and adoption at launch (and managed to cut the price and then change the price model later on.)
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