It's a great time to be an Apple fan -- the Internet is rife with well-written analysis and speculation about the potential Apple Tablet project. Here is what I recommend:
Antacid tablet: Strong analysis and speculation from the always great John Siracusa:
"The Apple tablet will have a color, video-capable touchscreen, about 10 inches diagonal. It will have flash storage, WiFi networking, and few ports and hardware buttons. There will be a software keyboard. Its operating system will be based on the same core as Mac OS X and iPhone OS, and its GUI API will be an evolution of Cocoa Touch. The platform will (eventually) be open to third-party developers. You will be able to buy media and applications right on the device using your existing iTunes account. Some of that media will be new territory for Apple: print media like magazines, newspapers, and books.
Next, the good bets. The heart of the hardware will be silicon designed in-house at Apple by the PA Semi guys. This will give Apple a slight price/power/performance advantage versus other similar devices. Apple will define its own format for electronic print media distribution. It will most likely be based on web technologies, much like the iTunes LP format. Best case (but also the least likely), it'll be a slightly incompatible extension of the ePub standard. Worst case (and most likely), it'll be an entirely new format. Either way, like iTunes LP, the format will be publicly documented and there'll be an SDK available to all interested parties…eventually. It will be possible to port iPhone OS applications to the tablet, though considerable coding and interface work will be required to do so well. Assuming there's more than one tablet model, Apple will not be afraid to push up against, or even into the MacBook price range with the top-of-the-line tablet."
That all seems like a lock to me.
Thoughts on what an Apple tablet should be – or not: Andy Ihnatko presents a fairly complete round-up of all aspects of the proposed Tablet, including this thought experiment:
"You want to try to figure out the UI of the RAT? Go get yourself a comic book, or any other rectangle that measures roughly 10†on the diagonal. Hold it as though you’re reading what’s on the surface.
You see the problem? Your fingers get in the way. Think about how big that surface is, too. That’s a lot of acreage to scan, looking for the right buttons to push.
While you’ve got it in your hands, imagine that it’s a sheet of thin steel. That’s heavy, isn’t it? Hard to hold up for long periods of time."
However, Mr. Ihnatko is totally wrong when he says that Apple won't open up the iTunes store to sell books and periodicals. Having to wade through the App Store in order to find the right application for the magazine that you want to look at, or the book that you want to read, would just be too poor of an experience.
The Tablet: I know that I've already linked to this piece by John Gruber, but it's just so good that I'm linking to it again. There are a lot of great passages, but I want to highlight this one:
"Like all Apple products, The Tablet will do less than we expect but the things it does do, it will do insanely well. It will offer a fraction of the functionality of a MacBook — but that fraction will be way more fun. The same myopic feature-checklist-obsessed critics who dismissed the iPhone will focus on all that The Tablet doesn’t do and declare that this time, Apple really has fucked up but good. The rest of us will get in line to buy one."
This is so true, and really sums up how the pundits and analysts always get their calls on Apple wrong.
Prediction: Apple to release two tablets, and other prognostications: Pretty standard piece by Jim Dalrymple on The Tablet, including this bit that I've seen in a bunch of other places:
"External keyboards: I expect the tablet to support external keyboards through Bluetooth. That just makes sense to me — the device will have Bluetooth like the iPhone, so why wouldn’t it support an external keyboard. People will be using the tablet to type and work more than they do on the iPhone, so a keyboard would be welcome."
While this would be nice, I think this is totally wrong. Apple won't support Bluetooth keyboards on The Tablet, because they'll want to be committed to whatever input mechanism that the do provide.
“The Tablet†and gadget portability theory: Another smart piece from Marco Arment, the goes over where an Apple Tablet would fit in the computing landscape. In particular, this dressing down of Laptops is great:
"Laptops are a strange, inefficient tradeoff between an iPhone’s portability and a desktop’s capabilities. They don’t satisfy either need extremely well, but they’re much closer to desktops than they are to iPhones. The usefulness and portability gap between a laptop and an iPhone is staggeringly vast (1:00). You don’t have them with you most of the time, they’re big and heavy (even the MacBook Air weighs 10 times as much and consumes about 10 times as much space as an iPhone 3GS), and they can only be practically used while sitting down (or standing at a tall ledge). Ergonomics are awful unless you effectively turn them into desktops with stands and external peripherals. But they can do nearly any computing task that desktops can do, and they’re able to replace desktops for many people."
I'm so not into laptops as a main machine (or even worse, only machine), and it's great to see someone pierce the hype.
And there you have it. It's a little over 2 weeks until Apple's rumored January 27th event at the Yerba Buena center in San Francisco, and at this point, I really do hope that Apple pulls something out of its bag of tricks.
-Andy.