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Peeve Farm
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Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Wednesday, December 3, 2003
16:41 - I'll take the red tablet
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20031127.html

(top) link
A number of people have lately started suddenly forwarding me all these I, Cringely articles, including this one, which describes Microsoft as a company that may as well be selling breakfast cereals for all the weight it places on creating revolutionary new technologies (instead choosing to-- gasp!-- make money on a consistent basis for its shareholders). Good stuff, but I must admit that it's caught me by surprise that it was notable enough for so many people to mail it to me out of the blue, whereas I'd never before even heard of Cringely except once or twice in passing. I guess I'd better keep an eye on him-- most of the articles seem like exactly the kind of thing I'd like to read as soon as they let me clone myself a couple of times.

Anyway, John forwards this week's column, which is all about a purported Apple entry into the Tablet PC market. Cringely speaks my mind here, all right:

Tablet computers have been around in various forms for years. Back in the early 1990s, we called it Pen Computing, and VCs lost a lot of money trying to get us to exchange our keyboard for a touchscreen and a stylus. The product success that emerged from that experiment was something both more and less than what was expected -- the Palm Pilot and later Windows CE. We didn't replace our desktops and notebooks with pen computers, but we added a new type of little computer to our lives. It was that perfect technical play -- the chance to replace a seven dollar, little black book with a $399 PDA.

A couple years ago, pen computers re-emerged as tablets with a larger form factor, supposedly expanded functionality and definitely expanded pricing. Microsoft made a special version of Windows just for tablet PCs, and most of the big hardware OEMs churned out tablet designs. But we haven't been buying them. In a U.S. market that supports sales of 50+ million PCs and notebooks per year, total tablet PC sales from all manufacturers this year will be less than 100,000 units. The screens are bigger and brighter, the applications smarter and the handwriting recognition better, but tablet computers are still looking for their killer app.

Yeah. Apple has had tablet prototypes kicking around in the labs since well before Microsoft's first OEMed models appeared back in 2001 or so; if they'd wanted to make a product out of that kind of form factor, they could easily have done so. They had the mechanicals in place. They had the chassis, borrowed from the then-new white iBook. What was stopping them? Apparently, only a little thing we like to call marketability. Why sell something that nobody seems to need? Even the G4 Cube had more obvious consumer appeal than a tablet computer, and it didn't sell. People knew PDAs-- they knew that a PDA was interesting for about two months, after which it sits in its sync cradle and gathers dust, annoyingly beeping at you-- Bee-doo! Bee-doo! Bee-doo!-- every time that one recurring meeting you programmed into it rolls around, until its battery wears down and you never think about it again. And what's a tablet PC but a big PDA?

Apple Computer has been decidedly absent from the tablet game. In part, this has to do with the failure of the Newton, which will always be associated in the mind of Steve Jobs with his former friend and nemesis John Sculley. "Real computers have keyboards," Steve has said a zillion times, and he'll mean it right up to the moment he changes his mind.

That moment appears to be coming soon.

Quanta, the Taiwanese company that makes many Apple notebooks, has been apparently switching its production to the new tablets, or at least that has been reported in the Taipei press since early this year. If this is the case that Apple is introducing such a machine as early as January, how is it likely to be different from the Windows-based tablet machines that have so far failed to excite buyers? And why, in the face of such lackluster sales, has Microsoft done another rev of its tablet operating system? What is it about this product niche that makes it so attractive to vendors despite more than a decade of failure?

The simple fact is that until next year, the parts won't have been there to make tablet PCs successful. What's missing has been the killer app, and what kept a killer app from appearing was a lack of hardware support, which I believe will be over soon.

Cringely thinks that the "killer app" that's coming soon is a melding of the tablet PC with a universal remote for all your media-- and you know, ho hum. We've heard that again and again for years. I'll believe it when I see it. Isn't the "Media Center" stuff for Windows supposed to do just that? Cringely's insight is that Apple will jump into the fray with 802.15.3, supporting HDTV-resolution video transfer over wireless links from TV/tuner to tablet so you can watch TV in any room in the house, wherever you take your tablet.

Sounds great. I just hope they can figure out the reception issue, because my laptop drops connection when I'm sitting in the comfy chair in my bedroom, twenty linear feet from the AirPort hub in the downstairs bathroom.

What Apple has uniquely going for it right now, if anything, is the Ink stuff they incorporated into Jaguar-- the Newton-style handwriting recognition that hasn't been seen since the "Eat Up Martha" days. If you're going to write with a stylus on a tablet, you need good handwriting recognition, and Microsoft's (as The Register and others have noted numerous times) isn't what you'd call up to snuff. Apple could clean house if handwriting recognition were the killer app. (Frankly, I can see no other conceivable reason why they'd have written Ink if not to put into a tablet someday.) But even that won't be any kind of silver bullet.

I think tablets have a long slog ahead of them-- nothing's going to make them the obvious choice for anything anytime soon, and I'd be very surprised to see Apple jump in with anything less than an offering that's completely useful right from the get-go. But Cringely's proposal suggests that either they'd have to announce a whole range of industry-leading super-WiFi-capable consumer electronics right out of the gate, or else wait another five or ten years for them to be developed and adopted as fast as HDTV has. Which is to say, not.

I'd love to be proved wrong, though.


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