Rumours of an Apple tablet computer have been around for years. Now however, it’s the hottest rumour on the mill. Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs has historically avoided producing a tablet computer on the grounds that he couldn’t see a market “space” for one. After all, we have smart phones that we carry around with us and for more serious work we use a laptop (or more recently maybe a netbook) right? So where’s the “space” for a tablet?
A lot of people have been asking this question recently and the answer lies in how you perceive the “space” into which a tablet computer might fit. As just another computer then I would agree with Jobs’ earlier conclusion that there’s no point in offering a middle-ground product that no-one actually needs. We know from Apple’s innovations with the iPod and iPhone though that Apple has a way of redefining a market so that it’s products become seamlessly integrated into it.
Before the launch of the now ubiquitous iTunes music store, I spoke to record industry executives who told me “There’s no way anyone will pay for music downloads – they just want them for nothing“. Well of course they wanted them for nothing, but these guys were missing the now well-established law of human laziness:
If it’s much easier (and reasonably cheap) to get a product straight to the player, people will pay for it.
So began the iPod revolution. Yes, it’s still possible to download music for free, but unless you live in your Mom’s basement and don’t have a job, it’s just too hard for most people to bother with when for 79p they can get pretty much any track they want in a matter of minutes – straight to the device. It wasn’t the iPod in itself that revolutionised the way we buy music so much as the way that the whole process of finding, buying and playing music was integrated into a single mechanism.
Now consider video. This transition is well underway, with TV shows and movies available from iTunes and delivered straight to your computer. ah, wait a minute though – who wants to watch TV on a computer? Well, you might watch on an iPhone in a suitable environment like the train, but at home? We want to watch TV on… well a TV!
Apple are well aware of this problem and it’s kept them from doing with TV what they did with music. At least on the same scale. To combat this problem they introduced a device that most people outside of the Apple Geeks community still haven’t heard of – the Apple TV.
The Apple TV is basically an iPod for your TV set. You connect this little silver box to your TV, your home WiFi network and presto – you can watch any video you have in iTunes on your TV. You can even rent movies and download them straight to the box from your sofa. What Apple were doing with the Apple TV was solving the “straight to device” problem for TV – just as they had with the music. The problem was though that it just didn’t take off. This left Apple with a still unsolved video problem.
Enter the Amazon Kindle. The Kindle (an ebook reader which gets books straight from Amazon to your Kindle device) has proved that there is a market for digital books and magazines. Amazon are desperately trying to convince people that the future of print media lies not in print, but in digital distribution – and of course, they’re right, but the Kindle isn’t the device that will do it.
The problem with the Kindle (which is a nice ebook reader) is exactly that. It’s only an ebook reader. Who wants a device that only does one thing? Among the many things that the success of the iPhone has proven is that people like devices that do many things. techies call it “convergence”. I call it not needing a manbag in order to carry around my gadgets.
Apple have seen this situation well in advance of the rest of us and revisited the idea of a tablet computer – but not just a tablet computer. A portable device no bigger than an ebook reader, but big enough to make a decent job of high-definition video would possibly be the holy grail of TV distribution that Apple have been looking for. But here’s the thing – what if Apple did for print what it’s done with music? What if there were an iTunes “Books” store that would deliver not just books, but newspapers and magazines straight to the device?
Enter the Apple tablet – the “iPad”.
More than just a big-assed iPhone.
Officially of course, it’s still nothing more than a rumour. However, the time is right for a revolution in print media and if anyone is perfectly placed to do it, it’s Apple. Unlike their foray into TV though, this time I think they may launch a print store and a device for finding and reading these new products at the same time. Not only that, but it could do for TV shows what the ipod did for music.
It remains to be seen whether we will all watch TV on what I’m guessing will be a 10″ display, but I’m pretty sure that we will all be reading our newspapers and books on one pretty soon.
So what exactly will this tablet look like? Most probably like a big iPhone. It will have an on-screen keyboard, may or may not have a camera (I’m going with a yes on that one) and may or may not require a cellular phone contract (I’m going with “optional”).
One thing I am sure of is that knowing Apple, there will be something extra in the device that’s unexpected. An extra “cool” factor and quite possibly the mechanism by which the device will redefine the market “space”. It could be a 3D control mechanism (Minority report anyone?) or an intuitive way to navigate books. The only thing that you can expect with any certainty is that we will all want one.