Antacid tablet: T]here are obvious answers to most of the common questions about the tablet—obvious and boring answers, that is, which is why everyone wants to talk about more fantastic scenarios, I suppose.... Instead of being all that people can imagine, it'll just be what people expect: a mostly unadorned color touch screen that's bigger than an iPhone but smaller than a MacBook... it must be a touch screen, it must be color, and it must support video.... So how will an Apple tablet distinguish itself without any headline technological marvels? It'll do so by leveraging all of Apple's strategic strengths....
Customers - Apple has over 100 million credit-card-bearing customer accounts thanks to the success of iTunes.
Developers - Over 125,000 developers have put over 100,000 iPhone OS applications up for sale on the App Store. Then there are the Mac OS X developers (though of course there's some overlap). Apple's got developers ready and able to come at the tablet from both directions.
Relationships - Apple has lucrative and successful relationships with the most important content owners in the music and movie businesses.
These are Apple's most important assets when it comes to the tablet.... It will provide an easy way for people to find, purchase, and consume all kinds of media and applications right from the device. It's that simple. (And if that sounds a lot like what defined the success of the iPhone to you, well, you're right. But it's a winning formula, and Apple's not going to pass it by just to satisfy the technology press's desire for radical change.)
Apple's doing the hard work... courting a new class of content owners whose wares are a good fit for a tablet-scale device: print publishers.... Other tablet-like devices have their own content owner relationships and stores, but none so far have anything to rival Apple's third-party application might. What Apple has is a platform, with all that entails. And it's a lot harder to establish a successful platform than it is to make digital retailing deals with content owners. Apple actually has at least two platforms so far: Mac OS X and iPhone OS. The tablet will add another.... Like I said, it's all so obvious it's boring. But even a merely competent execution of this simple plan will result in a product with advantages none of its current competitors can match. And an Apple-caliber execution could really shake things up....
I promised concrete predictions, and burying them in a thousand words of rhetoric hardly seems fair, so let's get on with it. If and when Apple finally does release a tablet product, we'll need much more succinct statements to quote in triumph... or in shame. First, the sure things. 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... a slight price/power/performance advantage versus other similar devices. Apple will define its own format for electronic print media distribution... based on web technologies, much like the iTunes LP format... like iTunes LP, the format will be publicly documented and there'll be an SDK available to all interested parties…eventually....
Finally the wildcards. Cellular networking is the biggest question.... I would not be surprised if the tablet starts out as WiFi only. I think there'll be a user-facing camera..... My final wildcard is a hardware keyboard—not attached permanently to the tablet, and certainly not required, but as an optional peripheral. After all, if Apple doesn't make one, a third party certainly will—SDK allowing, of course.
Despite all the crazy hardware speculation, I think the biggest surprises will be software-based. There's only so much you can do with hardware within a given price range. Software has far fewer limitations. Think of the prosaic grid of pixels that makes up an iPhone screen. Any hardware vendor in the world could have commissioned the production of such a thing; it's what Apple did with those pixels in its software that made the iPhone the iPhone. So, too, will it be with the tablet...
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