When Steve Jobs was quoted, "This is the most important thing I've done in my life", I suspected he wasn't just referring to the fact that the upcoming tablet would be a grand fad as the iPhone.
If my hunch is correct, Apple wants everyone to own a tablet powered by Apple. In fact, they want tablets to become just as ubiquitous as they were in every episode of Star Trek, The Next Generation.
What's the selling point if not the specs? Why, becoming a part of the first generation to herald the beginning a paperless world, of course. No more waste generated by piles of drafts which further cuts down on the demand for pulp; something that suits the enviornmentalists quite nicely (a tertiary market for Apple).
One of the problematic issues with Macbooks and iPhones is their inflexibility as portable devices when passed from person to person.
When you want to show someone something on a laptop, they have to physically take your seating place or angle their bodies to see your work. If you pass a notebook over, the recipient has to make accommodations by clearing space in front of them. Very inconvenient when you think about it.
Obviously, the iPhone is physically smaller and less bulky but impractical to read lengthy documents with due to the screen size and constant need to flick your finger to view the next page. Try reading a large PDF file sometime on your iPhone; believe me, it sucks.
These gadgets simply don't have the versatility of a printed page. You can't simply hand them off to someone and you can't curl up with them like a good novel in your reading chair or bed.
The Apple tablet could be a perfect compromise to become the first ebook reader to get everything right while still being powerful enough to work with commonly used applications whose documents you can then show to colleagues in a more casual manner.
I can see corporate editions of the tablet being offered in a wafer thin format as dumb terminals with limited storage space connected wirelessly to a server (Apple's Xserve perhaps?). A damaged or lossed tablet will therefore not constitute a loss of any data and can be disassociated from the server for security reasons.
This could also be the key to Apple re-establishing its dominance in the educational sector by providing students in select schools with their own tablet.
The concept is nothing new by any means, but this could be the first product of its kind to be widely adopted.
Do I expect the Apple tablet to be showcased tomorrow to be exactly this?
No. It will be hyped as a new computing experience with a price tag to match.
However, I fully expect this to be the natural evolution that Steve Jobs wants the tablet to follow - just as seen on Star Trek.
If my hunch is correct, Apple wants everyone to own a tablet powered by Apple. In fact, they want tablets to become just as ubiquitous as they were in every episode of Star Trek, The Next Generation.
What's the selling point if not the specs? Why, becoming a part of the first generation to herald the beginning a paperless world, of course. No more waste generated by piles of drafts which further cuts down on the demand for pulp; something that suits the enviornmentalists quite nicely (a tertiary market for Apple).
One of the problematic issues with Macbooks and iPhones is their inflexibility as portable devices when passed from person to person.
When you want to show someone something on a laptop, they have to physically take your seating place or angle their bodies to see your work. If you pass a notebook over, the recipient has to make accommodations by clearing space in front of them. Very inconvenient when you think about it.
Obviously, the iPhone is physically smaller and less bulky but impractical to read lengthy documents with due to the screen size and constant need to flick your finger to view the next page. Try reading a large PDF file sometime on your iPhone; believe me, it sucks.
These gadgets simply don't have the versatility of a printed page. You can't simply hand them off to someone and you can't curl up with them like a good novel in your reading chair or bed.
The Apple tablet could be a perfect compromise to become the first ebook reader to get everything right while still being powerful enough to work with commonly used applications whose documents you can then show to colleagues in a more casual manner.
I can see corporate editions of the tablet being offered in a wafer thin format as dumb terminals with limited storage space connected wirelessly to a server (Apple's Xserve perhaps?). A damaged or lossed tablet will therefore not constitute a loss of any data and can be disassociated from the server for security reasons.
This could also be the key to Apple re-establishing its dominance in the educational sector by providing students in select schools with their own tablet.
The concept is nothing new by any means, but this could be the first product of its kind to be widely adopted.
Do I expect the Apple tablet to be showcased tomorrow to be exactly this?
No. It will be hyped as a new computing experience with a price tag to match.
However, I fully expect this to be the natural evolution that Steve Jobs wants the tablet to follow - just as seen on Star Trek.
