Is the Apple Tablet real?

We we do these in batches, and we never know which one is going to be first, the other one my go live second, and then this will seem like we're talking from the future instead of like two weeks ago. So anyway, let's start this one off before we totally get derailed a little listener man. This listener mail comes from Tossin and seen says, Hi, guys, I love the show, although it did take me a while to get used to Jonathan. Hey, Chris Palette, you're the man. I don't.

I don't. I don't like Tossin. I think he's great. I thought you would. I'm the kind of guy who is a late adopter most technology unless I immediately see a huge benefit for myself. I owned the first DVD player from Sony and the improvement of the experience over VHS was revolutionary to me. However, when it comes to Apple gadgets, I'm a late bloomer. I got an iPhone

this past February and I was instantly hooked. So now, based on the new computing paradigm that Apple has created with the touchscreen functionality, I am eagerly awaiting the Apple netbook slash tablet thing. I was extremely disappointed to find the news on this is mostly rumor and conjecture about

release dates. I'd love to hear a podcast where you guys can do a little history of mobile computing platforms and end with some details anything official from the about the Apple to But thanks again and keep up the great podcast ps. You guys have slowly become my favorite podcast, beating out Josh and Chuck with They're a little too preachy for Me topics. Hey, you know we we try to beat them as often as possible, preferably when they're

not looking and we can run. I'd just like to say it took me a little time to get used to this email like it a lot. I think you should write it more. So we're gonna actually focus mainly on the Apple tablet, the rumors around it, and what we know and you know why there have been so many rumors for so long. The mobile app thing will probably talk about in another podcast. We've talked a little bit about some of the other things like Android and

stuff like that. But oh well, if we're going to talk about what we know about the Apple tablet, this will be like a three minute podcast. Yeah, we can't do that because Emily hates it. Okay, she she's she's so tired of us starting an Apple like is it? Is it real? No? All right, that's it. Well, we have made that joke maybe once or twice. Apparently that joke is now old. We we have jumped jumped the shark. She's only one person, and you know, no one else's

she's influential. She's a journalist. I know she's a journalist. So let's go on to the Apple tablet. Good lord, I want to get out of here at some point. So the Apple tablet, Uh, rumors of this kind of popped up ages ago, you know, years and years ago. Actually, But Steve Jobs has spent the last two years denying he's interested in it. That was a rudimentary time frame. I'm just making it up. Yeah. Well, but but even even before that, there were some rumors based just upon conjecture.

But then Apple filed some patents a few years ago that kind of suggested that they were interested in developing a tablet. And it's not like Apple hasn't developed something like this before. True, they have a pretty infamous p d A that, uh, that kind of is a precursor to the whole tablet craze. You know, we've got a lot of younger listeners, so I'd like to point out what a p d A is, or was a personal digital assistant or pd A. Actually, they him on the scene,

I guess early to mid nineties. They're very first ones. Um like the one that you were about to that, but yeah, basically they were they were like, okay, they were like smartphones without the phone digital planners, you know, keep your calendar, send yourself alerts um in some cases email, especially when they they got later. But you would have to sink those with your with your computer. At least

at first, they couldn't. They couldn't send information out on WiFi at the very first, and of course they well, exactly, this is the kind of thing that that developed over time. And then of course, as soon as uh Palm started with the Trio and some of the others started making sort of converging the two, the phone and the cell phone and the the p d A, basically we got smartphones and nobody wanted an individual p d A anymore. But that came up with the with one of them,

the very earliest ones, Yes, and that would be the Newton. Yes. Actually the Newton will play a part in our conversation later on. But the Newton um was infamous in that it had some half baked handwriting technology when it went to launch. You just guaranteed we're gonna get listen to me. Look, it is no secret that the Apple's handwriting recognition software was not as good as it needed to be when it launched. When it launched, Okay, that's what I'm saying.

When it launched, saying that the that the last Apple Newton to hit store shelves wasn't the best darn electronic device to ever grace the planet. It may very well have been, but those first ones were rotten Apples. Well, I have to say, not being an apologist because I've never actually had my hands on a Newton, but I

think Apple they're delicious. Yeah. Um, I think it's one of those situations where Apple found out then what other companies I'm not mentioning names, Microsoft, Pista found out later, which is the initial perception of the product. Um, it didn't seem to matter how much it improved. That initial perception really hurts. Yeah, so it's bad if you launch a product that one of the most um, most advertised

features ends up not working that well. It takes it'll take a miracle for you to recover from that bad publicity. And yeah, you know, there might be one or two instances of companies that were able to turn a product around and go from uh completely being in disgrace to being lauded as the best of the best, But it's pretty rare most of the time. If you get that first impression and it's negative, it's gonna stick with you, just like Chris was saying, and that was the case

with the Newton. It had a It became a punch line really for people who were desperately trying to uh to write a sentence and and then you would get this garbled message that made made no sense whatsoever as the as the device tried to interpret your con scratch. Now that that's again a precursor to the tablet days.

When we're talking about tablets, we're really talking about devices that have some sort of uh interface like a maybe a light pen or even a touch screen, um, that can interact either with a computer or on their own, uh like the way Calm tablets where it's very useful for people who want to do design work, um, and and h illustrations, that kind of thing where they can draw directly on a screen and create their their digital drawings. Yeah.

And um, you know they're the early The Newton and the Palm basically sort of set the stage for that, you know, because they offered the handwriting recognition. I mean, Palm's handwriting recognition was excellent, at least a lot better than Newton's original attempt. And of course there are a lot of people who swear by the improvements made in later Newton's but um, you know, now we've got touch screens and there's all kinds of ways to you know,

interact with it. And of course tablets have been out for several years. Yeah, you know, the the tablet form factor is not a new thing. The new thing would be that Apple getting into this game. And UM. Back in August of two thousand eight, the Patent Office received a patent from Apple for a device that was essentially a tablet that was running on os X because it was supporting the touch interface and UM, and that was really what kind of touched off the the the first

initial flurry of serious Apple tablet rumors. Now, let's let's kind of expand the scene a little bit. In the computing world, you've got sitting at a desk. I climbed the twelve stairs to my office. No, we're not doing an audio drama here. The no. When by saying the scene, I'm talking about the different level, different kinds of computers you can purchase. So you know, with Apple they do

notebook computers and desktop computers. Yeah, you know now that you say that, Actually that that's kind of interesting because the Newton was one of the first things that Steve Jobs got rid of when he got back. And UM. At the time, Apple's products were all over the place.

They had all kinds of different stuff. They had an education only PD a slash new knee thing called the eMate, which had only been out for a very short time before it was that was one of the products that actually was very well liked, and it just never it wasn't really given a chance. And that's the reason Apples line is the way it is now is because, uh,

Steve decided to make it into four parts. Basically, yeah, you had a desktop, and you have a laptop, and you have a consumer version and you have a professional version. And of course now they're starting to branch out from that. Yeah, now that they've got the iPhone and the iPod Touch, which in a way are manature computers, and they didn't have those products back then. So but even even now, this is all all very controlled, right, you know, you

still have very clearly delineated lines of products. It's not

like there's a whole spectrum um so. But but one of the big questions was that now that netbooks have become pretty popular, you know, you had the combination of cloud computing on the rise, you had the recession kicking in, so people had less money to spend on things like computers, and you had these incredibly cheap netbook computers that didn't have a lot of resources, but allowed you to connect to the web where you could use web services right exactly.

The other part of that people started to ask the natural question, which was will Apple get into the netbook game, because you know, they don't have anything that's in that space, and they could take advantage of that. You know, they could throw in because one thing Apple's got, hands down is selling style. Apple. Yeah, Apple cells style better than most fashion designers. Um. Their products are beauty full, They're

beautifully designed because they are such control freaks. The applications often also look very beautiful because they have to fall into certain parameters. Um, They're not necessarily going to be the best product or application for every single thing you want to do, but it's gonna look really nice. Um, but you pay for that style. They are premium products.

They are more expensive than, uh than PC products. Now, before I get all these this listener mail, let me go ahead and say if you were to build a PC that had the exact same computing power as the iMac or whatever counterpart, it would probably be about the same price. The reason why you find really cheap PCs is a lot of manufacturers will make PCs with materials that are like like slower processors, less hard drive space, you know, whatever they're they're using, uh, things that Apple

would not use. They don't want to use products below a certain threshold, okay. And also buying what what they do and using what they do in the in the computers and other devices. It also gives them a very narrow set of hardware that they need to support. Uh, you know, PC manufacturer might use a whole bunch of stuff across the board, and then that means that they have to spend you know, the time and effort to you know, either support it or end of life at

e O L it, you know. And yeah, the thing about a PC is you you can never be sure when you purchase one if the company that manufactured it is absolutely certain that all the elements inside it are compatible, because your video card and sound card might have some problems. And I mean these sort of things do pop up. Now with Apple products, it's much more controlled, so you don't have to worry about that. So that's another good

point point on Apple. Actually, yeah, Microsoft has to worry about that because you know, Apples OS ten has to work on all the machines that Apple's ever made that were compatible with it. I mean, it knows exactly what models will and will not work with it. UM like

snow Leopard for example, not working on the power PC processors. UM. But Microsoft has no way of knowing whether you're using Packard bell from or a Dell that you bought two weeks ago, and the processors and those and the kind of RAM that they use and all that other stuff are unknown, and so you know, there's some there's some issues there. So to bring this back to the Apple tablet, because boy did we get off on a tangent there just saying there's you know that that's part of the

functionality there is. They go, yeah, we know exactly what's in here, and that's gonna work. Well. The point being that there's the space between the iPhone, which is a smartphone, or the iPod Touch, which is ani computer. I manage your computer slash and P three player. Um, you have a big, wide gap between that and your lowest level MacBooks. Right, there's a there's a big price gap, and there's a big just device yeah or Mac minie. So uh so let's say that you know you want to get into

this netbook space. Well, the Apple executives have already said that they would not produce a notebook style computer for around five because they would be incapable of creating one that wasn't crap. The idea here being that they would have to um, they would have to compromise their standards in order to create a device that would meet that price point, and they're not willing to do it. Now. Some people have said perhaps the tablet could fill that

niche because it wouldn't be a netbook. It would, you know, have no keyboard. It would just be a a device that you would have a touch screen. Everything would be uh, touchscreen enabled. You might have an accelerometer in there as well, so that it works like the iPhone and iPod touch too. I bet that it's going to have an accelerometer in there if they make one. Considering the game's market for the ip Yeah, yeah, unterst thing make total sense. So this this device would kind of fit in that that

are that area. You know, you might be able to price it kind of competitively with a lot of the netbooks that are out there now. As it's turned out, the rumors appear to state that it would actually be much more expensive than your average netbook. I'm sure if your average netbook is around say, four hundred bucks. The most recent rumors I've seen for the tablets price range between eight hundred and a thousand dollars. Now, when you think the lowest priced MacBook, I think is so that's

a thousand bucks right there. Would you be willing to pay the same amount for a tablet as you would for an actual full notebook? Depends on what you're going to use it for. Yeah, well, I just can't imagine doing that. It's it's to me, it's really I mean, that device would have to be phenomenal for me to sit there and say, you know what, this is worth the same amount as a Mac notebook. You'd have to see what the market's going to be for that kind

of thing. And the market for a tablet computer in general is considerably different from the kind of person who would normally buy a laptop or desktop from themselves, because, well, at least traditionally speaking, the tablet computer has been aimed at UH professionals in certain industries, like the predominant one i've seen as medical, because they carry those those um computers with them, and it's you know, the tablet computer is much easier to carry than say a laptop, because uh,

you know, it's more like a notebook would be, and then they can make notes on it with the stylists. Um. And it makes a lot of sense actually that that's an application that that's sort of a no brainer, and you know, I can see artists and things like that and people. Possibly there's the idea that people might be able to consume media like you know, music videos, television shows, all that sort of thing using the tablets. So there's

that possibility as well. That brings us to the question of what is this tablet going to use as an operating system? Because there are two two different philosophies at play here. There are those who think that we're going to see a modified version of the Mac OS okay, and then the other people think it's going to be the iPhone OS. Well, so it'll be either a smarter, slightly smarter version of the iPhone or slightly dumber version of the MacBook. Yeah. See, the the iPhone OS is

very similar in some ways to the two OS ten. Yeah, so it's not so you're saying it would basically be something in the middle between the two. Yeah, whether but whether what approach did they take do they take beefing up the ipot or do they take the opposite approach? Where you you what would you do? What would I do? I would probably just create a brand new OS really yeah, because it's work. It is a lot of work. I mean, we don't even know that this tablet's comeing out any

time since. Okay, let's let's get that clear too. Here's here's what I mean. The reason that was the whole patent thing was the first step in thinking that there was gonna be a tablet. The next step was that there was a leak in the supply chain. Uh, not like that kind of leak information leak from the supply chain. There was there were these Taiwanese companies saying that they

were pretty creating these these large touch screens for Apple. Uh, and they were screens that wouldn't fit on any particular device that Apple is currently producing. So that led to the whole oh this must be for the Apple tablet thing. All of like two thousand nine, up through September, people were arguing about when this tablet was gonna be announced. We kept on thinking, Oh, it's gonna be announced in June,

when uh, when jobs comes back. No, it wasn't then moll is gonna be announced on nine nine on their big event. Note that it wasn't on that either. Um there were six. Yeah, that that's actually that is the latest rumor now is Macworrel January. Of course that's the

next big event that it was us. They're not gonna they're not gonna be a macworld, but there's a lot of conjecture that they're going to be kind of they're not really at c S. Well, according to the head of C E S they don't have a space at c S and so uh, and it would be really hard to fit them into that. I mean, you've seen them. They planned those booths out so far in advance. It would be really hard to squeeze them in some place. Like you know what, Sony, you don't need that entire

width of the the room. We're just gonna cut off this last you know, half of it. I don't think that would work so at any rate. Um, again, all we have are rumors, uh, stating that there's gonna be a tablet at all. Okay, the latest rumors that it would be available February two and that we would hear about it either at C e S or some event scheduled around c E S so that you know, they could capitalize on all the tech news that's coming out

in January. UM, there were some reports saying that we were going to see it as a a September October. I don't think that's happening now, since September is over and we're into I mean now. Granted, maybe from the time we record this podcast at the time it publishes, they come out and say it, in which case we're gonna feel pretty silly and we're probably gonna record something else in this place in a hurry. Yeah, But right now,

there's no indication from Apple whatsoever. Um. Although there was another interesting development that's going back to the Apple Newton, and an old friend of Apple has made a return after a very long absence. I'm guessing you're talking about Michael Chow. Michael Chow, who was one of the people working on the Newton back in the day. Um. He was one of the champions of the Newton, and so he ended up taking a lot of abuse when the

handwriting recognition feature didn't work out quite as planned. Well, based on my research, he was the person who convinced then CEO John Scully that it would be a great idea if you included the handwriting recognition in this device. Right, despite some engineers of arguing that it wasn't ready, they went ahead and did it. Anyway, Well, he left the company.

He's been away for fifteen years, and he's back now as a vice president and as the recording as of the recording of this podcast, we don't know exactly what he's doing, although the rumor mill, of course is flying that it has to be something to do with this

mythical tablet. Well, he did, uh spend some time as the general manager for Nike tech Lab, which is uh, you know there there they do have a partnership, Uh Nike and Apple do um they make a system that allows you to collect personal information about your running and walking and uh basically you can collect that in your iPod and upload that to your computer and do all

kinds of personal statistics. Wired actually did a great article about it, um about how tracking personal statistics is making people more interested in you know, well all kinds of things really, but you know, workouts. So you know, he's it's not like he was completely away from the Apple. No, No, it's not like you have to be completely immersed back in Apple culture so that he can become one of

the devoted again. But well, I mean they you know, that's the kind of thing that's portable electronics right there, so it's not possibility. But you know, they also have these products called iPhones and iPod touches that he could also be a I'm sorry, Yeah, I know it's hard. They're they're really minor. Hardly anyone's heard of them. But no, the uh yes, So we can't really jump to conclusions here is what I'm saying. So bottom line, is the Apple tablet reality or a myth? We still can't answer

that for sure. I think the tablet's coming. I really do think it is coming. I think they're working on making sure it's absolutely as good a product as it possibly can be before they go live with it, which may be the reason why it's taken so long for us to hear anything about it. They're just not ready. Um, you know, I'm sorry, I didn't mean. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if Steve Jobs was, at LEAs at first when he said they weren't going to do anything

like this. I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't telling the truth. And there's so much feedback, so many people are interested in whether or not the company is going to do it that maybe they're going, you know, guys, we can we can make this happen. If there are this many people interested in it, we could sell these things. I just want to do it right. I wonder if that that I mean, because Apple has created markets before, as you were saying to me earlier, Yes, they have

created markets before. They the iPhone, in in particular, is a market that they created in a way that no one else had managed to do. No one else had managed to make that in road into the consumer marketplace with smartphones the way Apple did, and they did. There are some great products that they beat out for that market too, and and they they even increased their market penetration when they opened it up to developers. Once they did that and they created the app store, forget it,

they they sealed that deal. They became the consumer smartphone in the minds of a lot of people. I mean, everybody's still not beating out things like the BlackBerry, but in the minds of the average consumer, I would say the iPhone is right up there. When you talk about smartphones. Well, um, you know, the App store has spawned app stores for all kinds of other groups. BlackBerry and Palm and Nokia all have their own and uh, you know, the tablet could take on another device to not just not just

the Microsoft tablets, It could take on the Kindle. That's true, it become it could become an e reader device. Now granted, the way to be a very sophisticated device something you can replace your iPod, your computer and a knee reader. But it wouldn't be eat ink. So it's not gonna so your battery, your battery life isn't gonna be the same. Uh. It also have a glossy screen because touch screens have to use that glass level the capacitance. Touch screens need

the glass order for him to work. You can't just have like a non glossy kind of finished. I mean, you could put a finish on top of it. But even so, um, if you did that, then it would probably affect your experience in viewing other kinds of media. So it's not going to be the ideal device to read books on, but it could definitely compete in that space.

You could start seeing books sold in the Apple Store. Well, since they already had the Kindle app for the iPod and iPhone, you know, yeah, you could just just extend it to the tablets. That's the thing is that will the tablet run the same sort of apps that you can get off the app store or would it be a totally different set of software. These are kinds of questions that would be very interesting to answer, it Apple,

I think, yeah, I mean, we don't. I would love to ask things like is it gonna be is it gonna just use WiFi? Is it going to use some sort of cellular modem? If so, are you gonna have exclusive carrier like a T and T you know, three G networks transitioning now into four G. You know, there's a lot of questions. So and unfortunately testing we have just as little information as everybody else out there, because Jobs has not returned my phone calls. It's ever since

I said, you know, I really don't like turtlenecks. He just he's been yeah, I know, he's He's given me I won't mock turtlenecks. Oh my god, I can't believe we made that joke. Let's wrap this up. We've been rambling for far too long. So there, that's all the rumors that we've heard. Um, well, we'll have to keep an eye out to see if what what comes to pass. I mean, I'm I'm hoping that we actually do see a February launch, but time will tell. And so let's

move on to our second batch of listener mail. This one comes from Catherine from Philly as an iPod Touch owner. I am still cranky over Mr jobs omitting of a camera from the revamped iPod Touch line gaming platform my great aunt Fannie. Come on, now, we all know that Apple just wants to give people a reason to buy the faltering Nano product line. For Chris us Okay, didn't get a still camera but video camera instead. But still, just wait next year. If the Touches sales dropped too much,

then Presto camera. I'll just have to hang on to my first generation speaker with device until then. Sigh. Catherine, Yeah, buck up, I've got a first g Why do you have to hate on Apple so much? Catherine? I mean, why why do you have this anti Apple bias? Oh no, don't go there. It's just nice to have someone else to talk to about that instead of getting all the email myself. If you have any rants, questions, comments, criticisms, and anything like that, you can send your email to us.

Our address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. If you want to learn about the Apple tablet, we don't have an article on that yet because it doesn't exist, but we've got plenty of other really cool stuff at how stuff works dot com. Crispy and I will talk to you, possibly about something that's real next time. For

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