It seems I am just about the only person on the planet whose opinion of Apple’s tablet computer improved after the release show. Many people were spinning fantasies about some kind of revolutionary new magical talisman that would change the world. I figured the new tablet would be a big, $800 or $1000, iPod Touch.
What it is is a big, $500 iPod Touch. Ah hah!
The possibilities for students, for example, are boundless. A network enabled, media capable slate that will hold all their textbooks? At about the same cost as a semester’s worth of college texts? Textbooks that you can mark-up and annotate right on the screen, and then export text to other programs? Awesome. There are limits, certainly, but there is a tremendous amount of capability there, at an astonishingly low price for an Apple product. The Taiwanese clone makers are frustrated and annoyed at a product that costs half of what they had planned on competing with. Developers are excited.
Watch the video and see for yourself. Turn off the sound so you don’t have to listen to the marketing bumf and just watch the people actually using it. Even if it’s not something you can see yourself using, surely it’s something you can see some people using, whatever Scott Adams and others might say.
Some people–hard-core geeks who wanted a device with all the features of a full-powered laptop, but without the laptopness, pie-in-the-sky Mac fanatics who wanted something forged by elves and designed by the gods–are disappointed, but I think this is a nice device that a lot of ordinary people are going to like. And, like with the iPhone, the pressure on the rest of the industry to rise to the new standard will be considerable, to the benefit of everyone.