International Mac Podcast

[EDIT: Will everyone PLEASE stop calling it the MacPod - Stu]

My prediction for the magical flying unicorn of a product that is the Apple Tablet is as follows; almost everything everybody, including me, has predicted so far will be partially to totally wrong. Obvious paradox aside, the build up to this iUnicorn mirrors that of the iPhone almost perfectly; hundreds of tech blogs speculating wildly different things about a product, agreeing only on a name (well, usually) and a few basic ideas about what it is. So yes, I could spend the next 3-4 paragraphs analyzing the exact position and length of every one of the few hairs remaining on Steve Jobs’s head looking for any clues to what this iFlyingNarwhal is, but that would be stupid, unhelpful, repetitious, and take longer than the 45 minutes I have allotted myself to write this before Chuck starts, so instead I’m just gonna write about what I’d like to see, and what I wouldn’t.

There seem to be 3 different schools of thought about the tablet; The “Super-sized iPhone”, the “Touchscreen netbook”, and the “Entirely new device”. I would bet if it’s either of the first 2 (eg. a new interface for an old UI), it’s more or less doomed to fail. If you remember Steve Balmer’s announcement of new Windows-based tablets earlier this month, well, you’re a minority, that HP Slate PC is long forgotten in the public eye, and that is because it runs a normal Windows UI. That’s not even a dig against Windows itself, Windows and OS X were both designed with a single, ever-present, pointing device in mind. With a multitouch screen you can have multiple ‘pointers’ at once, but there is no concept of ‘hovering’, the second you put your finger down on the screen it counts as a click, you can’t move the cursor around without clicking and so you can’t distinguish between moving and dragging. There are ways to adapt multitouch to the long-standing metaphor or a mouse, but then you lose many of it’s advantages, and as such make it much less pleasant to use.

The reason I don’t want the tablet to be just an iPhone on steroids is mostly down to lack of originality, as Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht mentioned on the most recent Diggnation, the iPhone interface is starting to become boring, it seems utilitarian in comparison to some aspects of Androids UI, and that could actually be a problem for Apple. As revolutionary as the iPhone experience was in 2007, it hasn’t been updated yet, and it’s more or less begging for a refresh. Let’s also not forget that the concepts in the iPhone UI (Icon-centric home screen, paged ‘browser’ navigation, bottom tab bar, etc) would be awkward, needlessly limiting, and not space-efficient on a larger screen.

The only way I see this iSecondComing living up to it’s hype is with a brand new UI, essentially a Frankensteinian mashup of Mac OS X and the iPhone OS. I imagine it sporting a much smarter homescreen that’s aware of media and the internet, much like the Apple TV homescreen. I doubt we’ll see a windowed environment per se, but I think that even Steve Jobs can’t deny the importance of multitasking on a device that big, so there might be some sort of dashboard or menu type app, kind of like the system in Google Chrome OS.

The real question that I’ve heard being thrown around is “Why do I even want a tablet”? Because Steve Jobs says you do! Well alright, it’s really because, though you may not realize it, laptops are often a huge pain in the backside. They can take over a minute to boot, have a control surface (trackpad) that is much smaller than the screen (or a even a desktop mouse pad), making them a pain to control, and only the smallest of them fit in a backpack or purse. Sure, laptops can do everything a desktop can do, but for simple things like web browsing in bed or replying to email on the go, they hardly make sense. Enter the iMagicalKnowerOfAllThings, that, like the iPhone, would stay in sleep mode to be ready in an instant, and sport an interface simple enough to use on the top of mount Everest with your hands tied between your back and your feet suffering of frost bite. See? Usage scenario!

So, that’s the basic concept of a tablet, but what else could it have? Well, first of all, a Pixel Qi Hybrid e-Ink/OLED screen would be wonderful and completely wipe out the Kindle, though that’s highly unlikely since those screens are still prototypes and very very expensive. More likely is a front facing camera, which would finally fulfill the long standing futuristic dream of a video cellphone. If we want to get really crazy, maybe they’ve invented a hand tracking system with the aforementioned front-camera, so you could control it without the effort of touching anything. Maybe it’s 3D, maybe it costs $50, maybe it is inflatable or foldable or something of the sort, the only rumor that is completely BS is the idea that it will use a stylus. If it uses a stylus, I will eat my apple store shirt. I swear, I will.

Have I gotten you drooling? Well, I got myself drooling anyway, the real question is whether or not my ideal tablet will be anything like whatever is announced next week. If it is, I predict it will sell as well and change the tech industry just as much as its predecessors; The Macintosh, The iPod, the iPhone, etc. If it’s not it may have about the same level of success as the “Project Origami” UMPCs or those touch-screen laptops, which is to say that it will be long forgotten just months after its release. Or I could just be completely wrong about what people want, which is also possible. I set up a system to email the contents of this post to me a year from next Wednesday, mostly to laugh at how inevitably wrong I (and the entirety of the media) is about this iThing.

Update: Slightly more than a year later. I was surprisingly kinda right. Let it be known that I, Keaton Brandt, am awesome.