My (Brief) Musing on the iTablet

If you follow any bit of tech news than you will know that on Wednesday of this week (Jan 27) Apple is all set to unveil the highly rumored tablet computing devise. I for one cannot be happier because the sheer amount of speculation about these types of things get annoying really quickly. Each site is desperate to outscoop the other so they post any menial bit of information that they think they might have just to make some noise. Is it a 10 inch screen or 11. Oh wait it might be 10.1 inches. *yawn

Although all of the news about such an unofficial device can be overwhelming, I also think it’s not necessarily unjustified due to how influential Apple and its products have been in the past decade. So with that I’d like to quickly share a few ideas/opinions in my head about the iTablet.

The tablet is for current Apple people only.

It seems to me that Apple is needing another device toopen the wallets of their truest fan base. They need to give the people who already own an iPhone, Macbook Pro, and iMac one more reason to purchase something Apple. I say this because I don’t believe that someone who doesn’t already own a MacBook or iMac would buy this. If I had the $600-$1,000 that this device is supposed to cost, I would much rather purchase a full computer.

So since this device’s immediate appeal will be for those who are accustomed to paying the “Apple Tax” I believe the tablet will be released at a high price point, probably the $1,000 mark. Then, just like with the first iPhone, it will receive a sharp drop in price a few months later. So perhaps around a $800 price tag for the Christmas season.

The first shipments will be full of software/hardware bugs.

When Apple first started getting crazy popular a few years ago, the main complement about them was how rock solid their devices were. As the company has grown and added more and more devices to their lineups the Quality Control has also slipped. The recent 27 inch iMac had large numbers of DOA, some screens arrived broken and the wrong software was on them that reintroduced an error that caused problems with Flash Player. The iPhone is a 3 year old product, but I’ve had to take the one I purchased 4 months ago back twice already for hardware issues.

As the scope of the company gets larger, its ability to control the details gets harder and quality suffers in lieu of quantity.

Betting against Apple

I’ve spent a good bit of time thinking about why Apple is introducing this device. I have tried to think of good reasons for wanting a tablet and I really can’t think of any that out way the cost. I mean this device surely can’t replace needing a laptop so it isn’t an everyday computing device. Yeah it will be a great e-book reader, but I believe e-books are in for a very bumpy road this year due to DRM problems. Until there is a generic e-book format that can be read on all e-book devices people are going to be forced to choose which company to buy e-books from. Right now the smart bet is on Amazon. Apple has a good bit of catching up to do if they want to go toe-to-toe with Amazon for that market. Also the Kindle gets punished for being too expensive at $400, so good luck with something twice as expensive.

The only area that the iTablet that has me excited for is comic books. I would love to have this device cause an industry shift and have comic books distributed digitally. I don’t purchase comics regularly because they run around $3 a piece and I don’t want to drive to a comic book store full of unbathed individuals playing with miniature figurines to get one. Give me an iTablet with any easy way to find and purchase one-off comics or to subscribe to a years worth of a certain line. The price should be cheap since there is no printing or shipping and the comic would actually look better on a high resolution screen.

Even though I can’t find a really practical reason for carrying this device around, I’m still hesitate to bet against Apple and call the tablet device a flop. Apple is full of some really smart guys who have just been knocking the ball out of the park lately. Apple has a history of redefining how people use certain devices. They didn’t just make another MP3 player or phone, the revolutionized how we think of music and cell phones. I’m assuming the tablet is going to be heavily leveraged with the App Store which will increase the devices ability to succeed immensely. Crowd source the work of having to come up with and create useful applications for this device to the world and just sit back and get your 30% of the profit.

So since I couldn’t come up with any good reasons to need this device, I guess I’ll just have to wait til Wednesday to have Apple tell me why.

Well that pretty much clears my head of what’s been floating around it the past week. Thanks for sticking around and reading it.