mac tablet?

Any word from insiders on a macbook tablet? What is the word on this: http://www.powerpage.org/archives/2006/06/apple_ultra_portable_in_january.html ?

 

There have been vague rumors of this for a few years now, but I don't think anything concrete. Some people think that some of the Apple patents filed over the last few years might point to some special Mac tablet (many of these patents also seem to point to some other multi-function touchscreen handheld device or video iPod successor that Apple might be working on).

I'm personally not so sure we'll see something like this any time soon, but you never know.

Just about anything you hear though is basically just speculation though. If Apple is working on this, they are keeping it really under wraps.

 

And who will write MacTabletPC OS for Stevy?
iPods ans iTunes and the rest of iCrap are
Apple's main business now, not notebooks
or something even more technically advanced.

 

Umm, Apple still makes a lot of money selling notebooks and various desktops, and a lot of their R&D goes into the software side of things for OS X and other applications besides iTunes, on the consumer and professional side (Logic Pro, Final Cut HD, Aperture, etc.).

One of the reasons that people have been suspecting a Mac Tablet is that OS X already contains a lot of things that would be necessary for it. Apple has integrated the "inkwell" handwriting technology into OS X for a few years now, and this is based on the Newton handwriting technology which still holds up today as generally excellent. One of the big things they've been showing off lately in OS X is also resolution independent UI elements, etc. which would be useful in a Tablet running OS X.

Apple has plenty of software engineers and hardware engineers who could be working on a project like this. If you really believe Apple has no-one on staff that does anything else besides iPods and iTunes, you are really ignoring a lot.

-Zadillo

 

sigh... we can only hope one day we'll have a mac tablet.
sigh...

 

I'd like to see a Mac tablet, but Apple doesn't release products just to throw them against the wall and see if something sticks. There has to be a compelling usability case for the products they release, as well as a broad enough market. Tablets haven't taken off on Windows except in vertical markets. They sound like a great idea, instinctively, but when you actually try using them, tablets don't really pan out. There are a couple of people in my law classes with convertible tablets, but none of them actually takes notes using the tablet feature. I was talking to one guy about this on Thursday. He told me that it turns out he can type faster than he can write, but more than that, he found that he had to write larger on screen than he had to write on paper, so he only got a handful of words per line, and it was just tedious. He said that there were time he liked the machine, like being able to read in tablet configuration in coffee shops, but that he didn't use it in the way he expected it to when he bought it. That type of reaction is a pretty strong sign that it's not the type of product Apple is going to be releasing, unless they can substantially improve usability for everyday, concrete (not pie in the sky or imagined) user scenarios. In some ways it's a shame, because OS X's single mouse button emphasis would be a natural for a pen-based UI, and Inkwell is already there.

 

Indeed Alan.

Do I think Apple is imminently planning to release a Mac tablet? No, not really.

But I am sure that Apple probably does at least have some people working somewhere on it, and they are probably thinking of the same things you brought up; what is wrong with the current crop of Tablet PCs, and for that matter the newer crop of Ultra-Mobile PC's that they are having trouble finding an audience, and even then finding an audience that uses their capabilities?

And I am pretty sure that Microsoft is probably hard at work on this issue too...... that's even more obvious, since I think they are still driven by Bill Gates' long-standing obsession with the pen-enabled computing concept.

 

Quite honestly, I'd like to see Apple take another shot at the PDA market like they did with the Newton handheld, technology has changed a lot since then, and OS X on a PDA is something I'd find incredibly awesome if it existed. Unix (OS X) running on a PDA is very possible. Like Zadillo said, using resolution independent UI would greatly help PDAs.

I can even imagine a white PDA/Black PDA as well, even it having a Logo on the back that lights up just like the notebooks. I know PDAs are a bit different from tablets, but like one of the posters above said, people end up finding out they type faster than they write, and I thought of that the first time I looked at a tablet PC, its what quickly made me dismiss the idea of getting one.

 

I'm a med school student and lectures are given via powerpoint presentations. Many people in my class bring their tablet and just jot notes on the slides. I don't think that tablets are useful for everyone but for students the advantages are there. And I think that Apple could bring a lot more business if they had a tablet, well, at least one more customer.

 

As much as I'd love to see that happen (I was a huge Newton fan, and to this day I'm still peeved at how Jobs folded Newton Inc. back into Apple only to kill them off........ I personally still would rather be using a Newton OS device over a Palm OS or Windows Mobile based device), I just can't imagine them doing it any time soon.

I think Jobs has always felt that the PDA market wasn't really worth getting into (he specifically referred to the Newton as just a glorified scribble pad), and the Newton also was John Sculley's pet project, which also contributed to Jobs not caring for it.

To some degree though, I have to admit he does kind of have a point, at least with the current state of affairs. It seems like the core PDA market has really stagnated; Palm OS and Windows Mobile's growth seems to be almost exclusively in smartphones now, same with Symbian and others. And I can't help feeling like the current crop of mobile OS's is still really lacking.

I definitely would love to see Apple take a stab at it again......... but I'm not sure if the magic of the Newton could be captured.

Of course, if some of the crazy rumors about the upcoming iPhone/etc. are true, about it being some crazy multifunction device with an adaptive interface, it probably could do a lot of what a PDA would be used for anyway. Will just have to see, I guess.

 

Tablets are dying. It has pretty much been a failure for MS, and I really don't see Apple entering this space. Like others have said they are good in vertical situations like hospitals. Hospitals have WAY too much software that would only run on Windows. It just is not plausible. As far as patents go, understand that companies apply for patents all the time. Most of them are just ideas that are fully developed and never see the light of day. It is more of a just in case scenario.

And about PDA's, they too are dead. PDA phones are the future, stand alone PDA's cannot compete.

Remember that Apple rumors are just that, rumors. They are fun to read about and speculate, but 9 out of 10 never materialize. G5 PowerBook? iPhone? Plasma TV?