Unicorn hunter roundup

Yes­ter­day, I wrote:

Apple might be the only tech­nol­ogy com­pany that inspires its own fan fiction. 

This was in response to this arti­cle in Mac­world, “Four rea­sons Apple will launch a tablet in 2010,” where tech ana­lyst Brian Mar­shall got to spec­u­late that Apple was REALLY launch­ing a tablet so that it could LATER launch a new Apple TV that included a built-in high-def screen and cost $5000. A “real” Apple TV. 

I mean, sure, why not?

A lot of the “jour­nal­ism” about the new tablet has been total fan­tasy league stuff. I’ve been there. It’s fit­ting that the myth­i­cal Apple tablet device has been nick­named “the uni­corn”: in Nam­ing and Neces­sity, the philoso­pher Saul Kripke points out that while we all think we know what we mean when we say “uni­corn,” in dif­fer­ent pos­si­ble worlds a uni­corn could have wildly vary­ing phys­i­olo­gies. A uni­corn could have gills. It could pho­to­syn­the­size. It doesn’t make sense to say “uni­corns are pos­si­ble,” because nobody could know from that state­ment alone what that might mean. Ditto the Apple tablet.

But Nick Bil­ton appears to have some actual sources on this, so the thing might very well be real. You might very well be rid­ing a uni­corn by the end of this year. I believe in the rumors enough that I can­celled my Nook pre-order to wait this thing out and see what hap­pens. (How many cus­tomers has B&N lost by not get­ting that thing shipped out by Christ­mas? Eh — maybe the ini­tial soft­ware would have been even more sluggish.) 

In antic­i­pa­tion of what­ever the heck might hap­pen at the end of Jan­u­ary, here I’ve rounded up the best four posts I’ve seen about the maybe/maybe not tablet.

John Gru­ber at Dar­ing Fire­ball, “The Tablet”:

Do I think The Tablet is an e-reader? A video player? A web browser? A doc­u­ment viewer? It’s not a mat­ter of or but rather and. I say it is all of these things. It’s a computer.

And so in answer to my cen­tral ques­tion, regard­ing why buy The Tablet if you already have an iPhone and a Mac­Book, my best guess is that ulti­mately, The Tablet is some­thing you’ll buy instead of a MacBook.

I say they’re swing­ing big — redefin­ing the expe­ri­ence of per­sonal computing.

It will not be pitched as such by Apple. It will be defined by three or four of its built-in pri­mary apps. But long-term, big-picture? It will be to the Mac­Book what the Mac­in­tosh was to the Apple II.

This is a cool idea, espe­cially inso­far as most peo­ple don’t really need to do every­thing cur­rent lap­tops and desk­tops do. This gets elab­o­rated by Marco Arment, who doesn’t really talk about the tablet as much as map our cur­rent ecol­ogy, in “‘The Tablet’ and gad­get porta­bil­ity the­ory”:

Desk­tops can use fast, cheap, power-hungry, high-capacity hard­ware and present your appli­ca­tions on giant screens. They can have lots of ports, accept lots of periph­er­als, and per­form any pos­si­ble com­put­ing role. Their inter­face is a key­board and mouse, a desk, and a chair. They’re always internet-connected, they’re always plugged in, they always have their print­ers and scan­ners and other periph­er­als con­nected, and their in-use ergonom­ics can be excel­lent. But you can only use desk­tops when you’re at those desks.

iPhones use slow, low-capacity, ultra-low-power hard­ware on a tiny screen with almost no ports and very few com­pat­i­ble periph­er­als. They can do only a small (albeit use­ful) sub­set of gen­eral com­put­ing roles. They are poorly suited to text input of sig­nif­i­cant length, such as writ­ing doc­u­ments or com­pos­ing non­triv­ial emails, or tasks requir­ing a mix of fre­quent, pre­cise nav­i­ga­tion and typ­ing, such as edit­ing a spread­sheet or writ­ing code. But they’re always in your pocket, ready to be whipped out at any time for quick use, even if you’re stand­ing, walk­ing, rid­ing in a vehi­cle, eat­ing, or wait­ing on a line at the bank. You can carry one with you in nearly any cir­cum­stances with­out notic­ing its size or weight.

Lap­tops are a strange, inef­fi­cient trade­off between an iPhone’s porta­bil­ity and a desktop’s capa­bil­i­ties. They don’t sat­isfy either need extremely well, but they’re much closer to desk­tops than they are to iPhones. The use­ful­ness and porta­bil­ity gap between a lap­top and an iPhone is stag­ger­ingly vast (1:00). You don’t have them with you most of the time, they’re big and heavy (even the Mac­Book Air weighs 10 times as much and con­sumes about 10 times as much space as an iPhone 3GS), and they can only be prac­ti­cally used while sit­ting down (or stand­ing at a tall ledge). Ergonom­ics are awful unless you effec­tively turn them into desk­tops with stands and exter­nal periph­er­als. But they can do nearly any com­put­ing task that desk­tops can do, and they’re able to replace desk­tops for many people.

This is some­thing I’ve noticed about my own com­puter habits. I have a mid-2008 Mac­Book Pro. I love its porta­bil­ity, but largely just because I can detach from my desk and move it around the house. I really hate lug­ging my lap­top across town to work, on planes for trips, or any­where that I can’t imme­di­ately get myself set­tled — all the more so since I lost most of the strength in my arm. 

My MBP isn’t really a portable com­puter, but a desk­top on cast­ers, if you get my mean­ing. I’ve thought about get­ting a Mac­Book Air, but it’s too expen­sive, or a cloud­book, but those are too cheap. So I’m actu­ally already in this market.

What­ever the Uni­corn is, it will be a gen­uinely portable com­puter, like the iPhone. And it won’t make pre­cisely the same trade­offs in power and func­tion­al­ity as either the iPhone or the Mac­Book Air in order to do it.

I think my favorite post is by Ars Technica’s John Sir­a­cusa, who brings Ockham’s Razor to bear on the rumors and spec­u­la­tion with sur­pris­ingly sat­is­fy­ing results:

There’s also the pop­u­lar notion that Apple has to do some­thing entirely new or totally amaz­ing in order for the tablet to suc­ceed. After all, tablets have been tried before, with dis­mal results. It seems absurd to some peo­ple that Apple can suc­ceed sim­ply by using exist­ing tech­nolo­gies and soft­ware tech­niques in the right com­bi­na­tion. And yet that’s exactly what Apple has done with all of its most recent hit products—and what I pre­dict Apple will do with the tablet.

That means no haptic-feedback touch­screen, no folding/dual screens, no VR gog­gles or mind con­trol. Instead of being all that peo­ple can imag­ine, it’ll just be what peo­ple expect: a mostly unadorned color touch screen that’s big­ger than an iPhone but smaller than a Mac­Book. If I’m being gen­er­ous, I’ll allow that maybe it’ll be some­thing a bit more exotic than a plain LCD dis­play. But there are hard and fast con­straints: it must be a touch screen, it must be color, and it must sup­port video. (We’ll see why in a bit.)

So how will an Apple tablet dis­tin­guish itself with­out any head­line tech­no­log­i­cal mar­vels? It’ll do so by lever­ag­ing all of Apple’s strate­gic strengths. Now you’re expect­ing me to say some­thing about tight hardware/software inte­gra­tion, user expe­ri­ence, or “design,” but I’m talk­ing about even more obvi­ous factors.

* Cus­tomers — Apple has over 100 mil­lion credit-card-bearing cus­tomer accounts thanks to the suc­cess of iTunes.
* Devel­op­ers — Over 125,000 devel­op­ers have put over 100,000 iPhone OS appli­ca­tions up for sale on the App Store. Then there are the Mac OS X devel­op­ers (though of course there’s some over­lap). Apple’s got devel­op­ers ready and able to come at the tablet from both direc­tions.
* Rela­tion­ships — Apple has lucra­tive and suc­cess­ful rela­tion­ships with the most impor­tant con­tent own­ers in the music and movie businesses.

These are Apple’s most impor­tant assets when it comes to the tablet, and you can bet your bot­tom dol­lar that Apple will lean heav­ily on them. This, com­bined with Apple’s tra­di­tional strength in design and user expe­ri­ence, is what will dis­tin­guish Apple’s tablet in the mar­ket. It will pro­vide an easy way for peo­ple to find, pur­chase, and con­sume all kinds of media and appli­ca­tions right from the device. It’s that simple.

Kas­sia Kroszer at Book­square is even more defla­tion­ary, again in a good way, point­ing out we can’t just look to a Jesus Device to solve all of our problems:

Apple is an aggres­sive com­pany. Apple is a tech com­pany. And pub­lish­ing peo­ple don’t nec­es­sar­ily get Apple. Last week’s breath­less rumor about a 70/30 split (70% to pub­lish­ers) was the tip-off. 70/30 is the stan­dard Apple split! What is missed in the fine print (what is it about fine print that makes us always over­look it?) is that this split is on sales price, cash receipts, what­ever you want to call it. Apple will not (unless I seri­ously mis­judge their busi­ness acu­men) be less aggres­sive on pric­ing than Ama­zon and likely won’t sub­si­dize prices. I sus­pect Apple will not get into bed with book pub­lish­ers unless book pub­lish­ers play along.

If any­thing, the Uni­corn will be part of an inter­est­ing and diverse dig­i­tal read­ing mix. Of course, we already have one of those — you’re using it right now — and very few pub­lish­ers are exploit­ing the poten­tial of what already exists. The Uni­corn won’t be run­ning an exotic new plat­form with mag­i­cal capabilities.

So let’s recap. It’ll be more portable and more fun than the best lap­top you’ve ever had. You’ll be able to enjoy more con­tent than you’ve ever been able to on your iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV. It’ll be faster, more ver­sa­tile, and more beau­ti­ful than any ded­i­cated read­ing machine. And while it won’t “save” pub­lish­ing, it will prob­a­bly be one of the major cat­a­lysts that prod it towards the future.

And this is only if what every­one admits to be true is true.

I think that’s worth wait­ing three weeks for.

4 Responses

Howard Weaver says:
January 3, 2010 at 8:51 pm
What­ever else hap­pens, this will at least inspired this line from David Carr in the Times: “There hasn’t been this much hype about a tablet since Moses came down from mountain…”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/business/media/04carr.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Reply
Tim Carmody says:
January 4, 2010 at 4:11 am
Zing! :-)
Reply
Dan says:
January 5, 2010 at 6:46 am
Tim: This blog post counts as pub­lic ser­vice. I am edi­fied and can now tech-fantacize freely.
Reply
Tim Carmody says:
January 11, 2010 at 6:25 am
Andy Ihnatko writes another good spec­u­la­tive piece.
Reply