Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Impending Mac tablet: What is it?

Impending Mac tablet: What is it? Hell if I know.

Is it just a big iPhone? If so, then it would be too big to be a truly functional iPhone. It has to be more than that.

Is it just a touchscreen keyboard-less laptop? If so, then it would be a pretty limited laptop. It has to be more than that.

Is it just an in-between machine? If so, it could do neither well, requiring an iTablet owner to own all three. It has to be more than that.

I think one thing we should do, however, is to stop focusing on the hardware. What an iSlate really needs to get off the ground is proper media connectivity and content, all accessed through an intuitive OS. The hard part is getting all the publishing and media companies on board, along with a sleek content delivery system, but Jobs probably has a lot of that wrapped up into a nice easy to use iTunes package already. How encompassing will that "a lot" be, and will it be enough? We shall see tomorrow... and in the months and years following. The iPad could end up being as important as the iPhone, or it could end up being as irrelevant as AppleTV.

The other part of all of this I personally wonder about is whether or not all that media goodness will be available to us multitouch MacBook and MacBook Pro owners. I'm not really holding out a lot of hope there, but maybe Apple will surprise us there too.


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