These are some thoughts similar to Daring Fireball. My prediction: The Apple tablet will contain higher quantities of everything that Apple-haters hate about Apple than anything they’ve previously made. It will be expensive[a]. It will be unhackable. It will have less features, lower specs and something monopolising. But most of all, customers will love it, and that really peeves them off.
But I reckon the impending tablet isn’t for them. Most people who hate Apple are nerds. They take glee in how complicated computers are, enforcing artificial self worth by building walls of incomprehensibility.[b] I suspect, hope, the Apple tablet will destroy their carefully constructed world. They’ll complain but they’ll lose.
There’s no reason communicating, organising your life, playing games, banking, socialising, learning or any of the most common activities should be anything but simple, safe and a pleasure. Forget command lines and viruses, even the notion of files should be reserved for the professional and hobbyist computer user.
Of course, nearly everyone who will comment on the Apple tablet will be a computer professional or hobbyist. They won’t be able to do much new with it. It may be a nice but expensive, for now, addition to their digital life. But it’s not for them. Eventually, they will buy one though, for their non geeky friends and relatives so they don’t have to be the family support geek. I’m really excited about inviting the remaining majority of the people in my life into the digital world. And not because I want to show off.
Bonus disc: Some technical predictions. Because of these, I think we’re going to see another fork of OS X. It’s a bit obvious to say it won’t be the iTouch OS, nor will it be the standard OS X. It will probably have a separate app store, keeping those viruses at bay, although how they deal with my Dad’s “my iPhone app won’t work on the laptop” problem is an interesting one. It will probably do very little, and keep getting better as they figure out the platform, just as the iPhone.
This is what I hope anyway. It’s the only way I can see a tablet working - by not making it about the hardware.
[a]: I don’t think they were floating the $1000 mark to gauge reaction. How can you react to a price of something you know next to nothing about, or worse, have the wrong idea of.
[b]: Intelligence is not being able to understand other people’s stupidity. Much of my job is spent deconstructing overcomplicated systems, whilst massaging the egos of their creators as colleagues realise the computer emperor has no clothes. But this is another topic.
