And you hold the tablet with your third hand.
Lol. Well I assume holding the tablet on your lap or on a table with a stand might allow you to have two hands free. One great advantage is two player games, like air hockey.
My prediction:
It can't run an Intel processor, because of power requirements & Apple doesn't want this to be compared to a netbook.
That means not the PC version of OSX.
But the iPhone version would need changes to leverage the bigger form factor.
So: a new OS. Closer to, or a superset of, the iPhone version.
"Keyboard" is split in the lower corners, so that the virtual keys are under your thumbs if you're holding it in two hands; also arranged so that you can set the device down and type with all your fingers.
Wi-Fi built in, of course. 3G hardware may be present but 3G contract won't be required.
Sexy as anything, but they won't sell many. Remember the reaction to the Air? People loved it, but when people thought about their next purchase 90% went with regular notebooks.
Everybody should know by now that the tablet is going to be running a custom build of OSX, just like iPhone is running a custom build of OSX. They all will have similar APIs, Apple isn't that stupid to develop an API completely different and strange just to piss the devs off. It'll have a common theme among all three apps and with the huge success of the App store, the
developers are not going to complain about it.
The problem is still the size of the screen, the benefits of having virtual side keyboard is not going to fit well with a 10" screen, the smaller, the more efficient it would be.
Of course the contract will not be required, it'll be the same setup as iPhone/iPod touch. People nowadays cutting down on costs, at least I hope they are but the way the economy is recovering slowly, it looks like they are spending within their means. But i could be talking out of my ass. I just hope people don't fall into that trap of trying to get thetablet with 2 years contract just because it has a cheaper price. Too many people don't realize how much they spend overall with 2 years contract.
As for the 90% buying regular notebooks, that had to do with the high price of the Air. If it was selling for less than 1300$ it would be a hot seller. People still love Air and would love to get them but not when netbooks can be had for 300$ or less. It's about cost justification.
Apple can survive with a low volume market, they thrives on high margin sales. There are enough people who'll just buy the tablet regardless of the cost.
Another operating system with pervasive multi-touch supports 100 fingers in its APIs - so you and 11 of your friends could gesture!
I don't know if you saw it, there's a video of 3M monitor with more than 10 fingers multitouch capability. You can find it at engadget.
While there is no actual information that we didn't already know here, it is still a little sad that the device will not run a true version of Mac OS. But we knew that. First of all, the iWhatever will not be x86-based--it's either PPC or ARM. If you look through the 10.6 frameworks and extensions, you will notice that the kernel and many other critical components are universal binaries (most things that are not related to graphics and/or OpenCL). Apple wouldn't have continued multi-platform development on only parts of Snow Leopard if they had intended to release a tablet device with a full build.
Sadly this is true. Clearly, they are not going to turn down an assload of coldhard now that they have discovered how to play the app store game.
There's no false version of Mac OS. iPhone is running a custom build of Mac OS X and so will iSlate.
PPC is completely dead to Apple. They will not go back to that. They have ARM version of OS X running on their iPhones/iPod Touch, there's nothing special about it. They'll just build a custom build of OS X for the tablet, nothing difficult. It'll require a bit more engineering resources but I am sure Apple can handle it.
App Store is a must for the tablet, it'll encourage the software developers to develop the next generation of software that'll take full advantages of the tablet's capability. We don't want people to simply port their Mac apps to the tablet, we want them to customize it for the tablet. That's the killer app that'll ensure some kind of success for the tablet that none of the Windows tablet have succeeded before due to them just slapping Windows on top of it and doing nothing special (before W7 of course).
Well, what do we have here? "Apple Tablet cases - Coming soon!"
http://www.myincipio.com/category/apple_tablet_cases/
It never ceases to amaze me how people just find that little stuff out of nowhere.
And no it won't be gone - I will bet $500 against your $50. However, something tells me you won't be around on Jan 28, when I show up to collect.
