Dear tablet naysayers: Stop looking back when we’re thinking ahead

[LizKat]

Huh? Not every Apple product has been successful. Just because it may have reached a certain stage in its development doesn't mean it's a slam dunk.

Who's saying it's stupid? Not me. I'm saying that there isn't a demand/market for it. I think that's perfectly reasonable.

Didn't mean you. Sorry if it read that way! I meant.. looking for link.... some guy on CNET who blogged about "Why consumers won't buy tablets." It was stupid, trust me, but if you don't, here is the link (and there are others, aplenty, saying similar silly things):

http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-10303158-250.html​

 

[Michael CM1]

Out of all the posts I read, I think the one who said, "Nobody woke up a decade ago and needed to carry around 2,000 songs" has it the best.

If Apple isn't releasing some iPod/MacBook hybrid device, it's gonna be a huge hit to all of these people telling us something's up. So I'm assuming some sort of tablet device is on the way.

What none of us know is what I saw mentioned elsewhere - what's the killer app? My best guess about what this device could be is the Kindle DX. But it's only made for reading books. Viewing eBooks on a tablet would be pretty much a must, especially if Apple can work out Kindle compatibility.

But then what? Well, if this device is really some sort of hybrid, imagine a thin flip-out keyboard and some sort of stand. This could be the perfect device for student use. Basically a low-powered MacBook Air combined with a Kindle. You can use it one way as a notebook and another way as a tablet. Amazon and/or other providers get textbooks into the electronic format and create a huge new industry.

I just saw a bit on "Today" talking about weight distribution on kids backpacks. Books are HEAVY, especially as you get to high school and college. If Apple were to make this device as above and publishers got aboard, you have a textbook-replacement device. Charge about half price for the eBooks, and you will save paper, money, backs, space, etc.

Apple and others could start pushing this into a few schools, probably universities, and then move on down to lower levels if successful. I have the Kindle app for iPhone, and I can see the huge benefits just the Kindle gives readers if its screen is as good as advertised. Apple's doesn't need to be as good, but something close could change reading.

Oh, and as someone who gets money working at a newspaper, this could really boost our bottom lines. Bigger publications already go on Kindle. If there's some easy way to get the smaller papers out in such a format (check out USA Today's e-edition), it could give us life. It's kinda what rumors say Apple is doing with the music industry in that "cocktail" application.

 

[Surely]

Didn't mean you. Sorry if it read that way! I meant.. looking for link.... some guy on CNET who blogged about "Why consumers won't buy tablets." It was stupid, trust me, but if you don't, here is the link (and there are others, aplenty, saying similar silly things):

http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-10303158-250.html​

I agree with that blogger.

 

[LizKat]

omg I feel bad for you! CNET always has such awful doomsaying stuff about Apple devices if they're not big clunky machines with separate keyboards and towers and mice and stuff from the 20th century. They don't get it. You can have a perfectly useful portable device that's also fun, and Apple's pretty good at pegging a price point.

CNET knows the drill with apple gadgets by now... their bloggers just write stuff up to draw a couple hundred extra eyeballs to the site to put comments in and straighten out their thinking

otoh if the alleged tablet from Apple doesn't have at least some multitasking capability, like taking notes while surfing, I will have to write to Mr. Jobs and complain, right after I write to that CNET blogger and apologize.

 

[LethalWolfe]

I can't really think of a product which Apple has released which is not well thought of and executes its role near perfectly.

Pippin, Cube, ROKR, TV, MB's w/o FW, Glossy-only displays, the freakin' hockey-puck mouse, any late-model G4 tower...


Lethal

 

[SactoGuy18]

Surely, you wrote:

The demand for the iPod was due to the huge collections of music that people had and no good way to make it portable.

The market for the iPod was there for the taking because people were tiring of dealing with the mechanical issues of cassette players and the dealing with disc skipping on portable compact disc players. Once portable music players could accommodate a large amount of music in flash memory (2 GB of storage and larger), you could hold substantial music collections for many hours of playing time with no worries about damaging the hard drive even if you dropped the player. That's why on my 16 GB 4G iPod nano I now have over 60 record albums encoded in 256 kbps VBR MP3 and AAC format stored on it, and I still have plentiful room for many more albums.

 

[mysterytramp]

It is one thing to fight people with whom you disagree. That helps to make a World. It is quite another to fight people with whom you agree. That is just plain stupid.

Didn't realize this was a fight. Thought it was a discussion. You made a point I disagreed with. Sorry I hurt your feelings.

And that CNET guy's a dinosaur. His next column will be about those pesky neighborhood kids messing up his lawn.

mt

 

[Michael CM1]

omg I feel bad for you! CNET always has such awful doomsaying stuff about Apple devices if they're not big clunky machines with separate keyboards and towers and mice and stuff from the 20th century. They don't get it. You can have a perfectly useful portable device that's also fun, and Apple's pretty good at pegging a price point.

CNET knows the drill with apple gadgets by now... their bloggers just write stuff up to draw a couple hundred extra eyeballs to the site to put comments in and straighten out their thinking

otoh if the alleged tablet from Apple doesn't have at least some multitasking capability, like taking notes while surfing, I will have to write to Mr. Jobs and complain, right after I write to that CNET blogger and apologize.

I used to be one of those types and wondered why Apple (and others) spent so much time on case design when you can pretty much hide a desktop. But now I kinda get it, and it really makes sense when you spend that much money. I used to build PCs for what was inside and just find a relatively cheap case. The last one I spent a bit of money on because it had flashing lights, a ton of bays, and about 800 fans.

Anywho, I have now totally figured out the Apple culture. It is pretty much like the Lexus of computers except WAY more affordable. You can spent $1200 on an iMac, or you can spend half that on an HP PC that'll last half as long and such power away because of the nasty anti-virus and spyware software you need. Oh, and it gets to use WINDOWS! Yes, Windows - making simple things complicated since, well, whenever.

 

[mbpnewbie]

I have just skimmed this thread, but I do have some input to give. I owned a tablet pc for a couple years before I got my mbp. I sold my parents on the advantages of a tablet for school work( writing notes on screen while recording through a BT headset I had my profs wear.) I loved the idea, it was just the actualy use of the thing that agrivate me. the tablet spent most of it's time in a dock, where I had an external monitor(8-9in screens aren't big), keyboard and mouse. I also thought a tablet would be useful for photography work. So I bought it, spent a premium, and bacically ended up with a really slow desktop hooked up to an old crt. Like I said, I love the idea, it's just the implementation that suffers.