Rumours of a new product: "iTablet"?

[z-mac]

I suspect that copycat manufacturers are watching what Apple and Mr Jobs do very closely:

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/12/09/tablet_rumors_february_production_start_10_inch_lcd_screen.html

If this tablet has dependable handwriting recognition, I will buy it.

[ben schmidt]

Agree with zmac - handwriting recognition/notations would be a compelling reason to buy an iTablet for me too. Although I've retired my Palm PDAs in favour of an iPhone, I do miss the ease of input on my PDA and Treo that I had with a stylus using Palm's graffiti character recognition system. And it'd be fun to watch Steve Jobs sell stylus support for an iTablet after dissing it for the iPhone -- but I have no doubt he could do it!

[z-mac]

iPad: it looks nice, but the OS is disappointing. In response to Jobs' comment that "netbooks don't do anything better",

they do price better
they do multi-tasking better
they do Linux better

[Dan Millar]

If you watch the keynote, Steve Jobs was not comparing netbooks to the iPad, he was describing the gap between laptops and smartphones, and saying that any product that could fill that gap should be better in every way than either a laptop or smartphone to have any value. What he actually said was  "Netbooks aren't better at anything". The rest I'll paraphrase - "they're slow, they have lousy displays, and they run clunky PC software".

The iPad is not a netbook, so any comparison is somewhat spurious.

Happy iPad'ing

Dan

[z-mac]

I watched the keynote with great interest. Imagine my surprise when I heard that the iPad doesn't use a PowerPC processor! (o;

The iPad is not a netbook, so any comparison is somewhat spurious.

If this is a spurious comparison, write to sjobs@apple.com. The iPad is a product in search of a market. Mr Jobs is attempting to define this new market. Mr Jobs, having by any capitalistic measure proven himself to have more intelligence than most of us (he even gets new internal organs installed quicker than you or I could), aims to define a market between the iPhone (mobile telephones) and the MacBook (notebook computers).

Netbooks are not full-sized notebooks but they sure are better computers and Web-browsing devices than iPhones. M-Windows is terrible on netbooks (the worst is that dialogs don't fit on the screen) -- but Linux is quite good... and I hear that OS X is good too. (o; Intel doesn't want anything better than the Atom in netbooks, so they will be weak performers until later this year when we begin to see ARM-based netbooks. (These will be running Linux.)

The Jobsian Reality Distortion Field may suggest something different, but netbooks have indeed been selling well -- there is a market for them, despite their weaknesses. And Linux is a better OS than iPhone OS (if that even needs to be stated). So is OS X, but Mr Jobs clearly wants to have the same control over the iPad that he has over the iPhone. Besides, any hardware that OS X can run can also be run by Linux. The iPad is a closed system.

Android is going to put pressure on the iPhone. The iPad may be a success. The hardware is cool, but locked-in. As a computing device, alas! it is a big iPhone. A good netbook has more functionality.

It remains to be seen whether people will pay enough (if at all) to sustain DRM content from newspapers and other publishers. Amazon has made money with the Kindle so far. As a browsing device, the iPad is cool... although I think its input options are either a) clumsy, or b) turn it into a netbook.

On the whole, a good netbook (e.g. Dell) running Ubuntu Remix (or OS X) is still a better, cheaper deal. Unless you are really shopping for something to give you that invigorating taste of single-tasking consumer-lock-in. (o;

[Dan Millar]

Well, if anything, the iPad could be compared to other "tablet" devices, but even that would be missing the point. You think it's gonna flop - I think it's gonna fly - check back in a year and see who called this one.

Sure, netbooks are a rapidly-growing segment - but ask any retailer, they are gaining market share by cannibalizing laptop sales, not creating a new category. A netbook is just a scaled-down notebook anyway - there's no real differentitation.

The OS IS the point - OS X, Windows and Linux are dated models of what the user interface should be - good for geeks, but what about "the rest of us"? - the people who don't care about and don't want to know how it works, just THAT it works. The iPhone OS is a new paradigm for computing - no more hunting for files, no more endless frustration for people who just want to use their computers to be productive. You may not agree, but I say let the market speak on this one.

And as to content - it is the publishers driving toward DRM content - not the providers. Here, Apple is leading the way for those content providers who want to deliver their content on something a little more flexible than a Kindle, and a little less dodgy than a netbook. Every major publisher in the world is in crisis - they cannot sustain the print-n-pray model anymore, nor can they continue to offer free content on the web. DRM is only an issue if you're trying to purloin content - why is this such a bugaboo for Windows/Linux users? I have DRM content that I paid for - and I'm not limited in any way by the fact that I own it! I also have my own content, and I can do whatever I want with it - what's the big deal?

I won't go into the whole, silly, multi-tasking argument here. Suffice it to say, the iPhone OS already is multitasking, just not for third-party apps, and the reasons have been explained over and over why that is the case - power management. The multitasking myth is a red herring anyway - Apple will roll out multi-tasking for third-party apps in iPhone OS 4.0's SDK, probably with some caveats as to how background apps can use the ability, but it'll be there if only to quiet the wags. For the geeks - the iPad has an ARM Cortex A9 MPCore and PowerVR GPU - much more power than most "netbooks" currently sport, so when they do multitask they will spank any such machine's bum, if you'll pardon the expression.

No offence to all those people who spent money on netbooks, I'm sure thay have their place, and the iPad is not going to replace those purchases - the whole point is this is a NEW category - it's NOT a NETBOOK!

Like I said, check back in a year. Oh, and while you're waiting, think back on how the iPod was received when it was launched, remember's Ballmer's monkey dance? You don't wanna be in that camp when the dust settles, do you?

Happy Mac'ing!

Dan