Major publisher preps for Apple tablet as delay rumor surfaces - Page 2

The air is too big. A smaller form notebook with a modified keyboard would suit me and others better who never fell for the thinness feature. The smaller full powered laptop is the 13" MBP and hence the best seller.
As for the discussion on the tablet. If a small 7-10 notebook running full OS was avilable what need would there be for a tablet running iPhone apps?

I have owned one for 8 months, it's not too big. It's a slim, light, sturdy, fast, excellent portable computer with a superb keyboard and a great screen. There is no one computer that will suit everyone's needs perfectly, Apple made a call. They chose to include a full-size keyboard, and go for higher performance than they otherwise could have with a smaller screen dimension.


Price is the reason the Air doesn't sell like the MacBook.


The tablet will not run iPhone apps, the tablet will not run iPhone apps. If the tablet runs iPhone apps I will be completely shocked. FYI all we really need is food and shelter, so give up on these arguments.

I don't imagine Apple will use an OLED screen if it will increase the costs by $1,000. There's just no benefit worthwhile enough to do this, and whatever they do with their operating system, I'd imagine it will use light backgrounds, not dark backgrounds.

Price? More like looks and power.

It could run them as widgets of some sort if they liked.

Target demographic. There aren't so many people out there interested in paying extra money for the reduction in weight and size. I know some college students and people in business like realestate who like their MacBook Airs very much. I would never buy one.

looks? Aren't you one of the many who complain about the "racoon" look, which the air lacks?

And the macbook air is meant to be a portable type-writer. Its not lacking power unless you bought it for the wrong reasons.

Will you two stop whining. Extremeskater, maybe that comment 70% of Apple shopper are teenagers that are never going to buy anything is a little astronomical. But even still I goto the apple store just to see their new products with no intension of buying them. anantksundaram was justing trying to enlighten us all that Apple Retail store are kicking ass with $6,600,000,000 in sales. So you two calm down already.

Onto the OLED...
HAHA, no way did apple pay 500 million for 500,000-1 million OLED screens. A tablet with an OLED would just be absurd. It is a fairly new and unimplemented technology and in my mind would do an inferior job than a LCD. While I'm sure Apple R&D could make the technology work fabulously with the OLED, Apple makes products for the masses now. This rumor is bogus, show me another Apple product that you gained one feature for double the price. (ie LCD vs OLED)

In the end the initial offering will be 1 model. The technological capabilities are changing by the month. Fast forwards in abilities. One would expect delays since advancements are right around the corner. When it finally debuts it will be $800, 1 model, and will change the world. Will revolutionize learning and school and be the catapult into the Individual Creative Content Age and jumpstart the global economy.

How about crt imac to lcd imac?

I did notice that the redesign of the LATimes.com web site looks suspiciously touch-friendly. Think they know something we don't?

I wish AI would become so. \

A portable type writer? True dat and an expensive one at that!
By looks I mean the size and thinness- looks like a toaster oven tray. But you're right - the screen at least has no black border which I do like.

Let the arguing begin ... all of the "experts" like you and techDud voicing an opinion on a device that doesn't even exist at this time, all saying how wrong Apple is/would be. Me, .... I think I'll wait to see what Apple has "up their sleeve" before I pass an opinion.... otherwise I'd look like a fool ... and you guys have that ground covered.

About 35 years ago (yeah, I'm a real old fart), I came across a guy name Kizumi Suzuki; we'd spent the summer in Santander learning Spanish, I was starting med school in the fall in the Canary Islands, and he was going to the school of diplomacy. We stayed in a cheap hostel in Madrid and what he did every night impressed the hell out of me, even though it took me decades to fully realise the sheer brilliance of his simplicity. Every night, he'd wash what he wore that day and hung it up to dry. The next morning, he donned the now-dry items; he never unpacked his suitcasenever.

In May of '08, I flew from Bristol to Bergamo to revel in the Mille Miglia race; not to belabour the point, my luggage never arrived; it hit me that it afforded me the perfect opportunity to see if I could do The Suzuki, as I now call it. The challenge was how light could I travel. The £25 tee shirtsthey dry in 2 hours and £75 sweatersdry in four hours from Rohan seem expensive until you realise that they let drop your carrying weight to a very manageable 5 kg, 6.5 if you include running shoes and a brolly. I was in the states last november for two weeks and didn't need anything more than fit in that overhead bag. The heaviest thing by far was the computer. The real issue for those of us who write and need our data with us is the weight of the carry-on. My old powerbook weighed 3 kg; the MBA weighs 1.5. Would I spend $2000 to drop another 1 kg from the only piece of luggage I use for travel?

You betcha

Have you ever seen the swiss cheese that cyclists make of their expensive bikes to drop grams of weight off their steeds?

Any one who questions paying $2000 for a better and light pencil just doesn't get it. It's the MBA market and we're waiting for this product

So who's doing all of the buying ... when their retail stores are setting $$$ per store numbers that are so high that M$ feels obligated to copy right down to locations and stealing staff to duplicate the Apple experience even 'tho they don't have the product.

Extreme, sometimes, in your rush to say something, anything bad about Apple,you forget to switch on your brain. I know you're smarter than that ... please think before you post .... we don't need another clueless TechDud.

I'm going to posit that there is no chance at all that an Apple Tablet will merely, or even mostly, be an e-reader. That's completely nuts. Nonetheless, it's worth looking at that application to see what Apple is going for and what technologies make sense in that light.

Let's look at the publishing industry. Look down. No, look farther down. See that rapidly receding figure about to go splat at the bottom of the cliff? No, farther down. Yeah, the speck. That's the publishing industry. They are looking at what Apple did for the music industry and thinking that maybe they want a piece of that. Circulation of physical media is down sharply, and physical media is expensive and labor-intensive to produce.

Now, let's look at the Kindle. Superficially, it solves this problem, except for one little tiny thing: It offers roughly the same reading experience that users of NCSA Mosaic experienced on the web in 1995. The font is always the same. The background is always the same. Images bring back fond memories of the days when .xbms roamed the web. The design that remains is one step above what you can get by downloading books from Project Gutenberg and reading them in TextEdit. This leads to two other problems that a heavy user of the Kindle that I know well has run into: First, as there are no pages, it's useless for scholarly work: You can't generate footnotes. Second, and far more serious, is the problem that since all books look and feel exactly alike, they all blend together and it becomes difficult and tedious to figure out exactly where that passage is that you're looking for, or to remember who said what.

For these and for other reasons, publishers really sweat things like paper and margins and typeface when they set a document up for print. In the case of magazines, there's a house style; in the case of books, each is a one-off. But everything from the weight of the type to the feel of the paper is part of the experience of reading a book or an article. Would the New Yorker still be the New Yorker in Times New Roman?

Fortunately, Apple has a handle on publishing. They have a handle on presentation. Solving the problem of how to most effectively bring publishing into the electronic age is right up their alley. They just have to look at the problems and how to solve them. The stickiest wicket is almost certainly font licensing. Books and magazines can use pricey fonts from legendary foundries because the font itself never leaves the publisher. But if you typeset your document in, say, Sentinel and then e-publish it, Hoefler & Frere-Jones would like to 1) have some say in the structure of that license, and 2) have some assurance that people won't be able to extract the font they got with a $2 magazine and use it for free. HTML5 does not solve this problem. Adobe AIR does. The foundry gets paid, the magazine or book gets its distinctive look, and the reader gets to associate (and merge) the visual impact of the font and layout with (and into) the contents of the book. If there are pages then 1) that's another win for designers, and 2) the e-reader can be used for scholarship, not just for entertainment, making it better not only for scholars, but for students.

The tactile feel would be gone, but I can imagine using a visual sample of real paper instead of just blank white as a background, and including a page-turning sound appropriate to the size and weight of the "paper" when the reader flips a page, to come as close as is practicable to replicating a book. There can be all sorts of advantages, like dog-earing pages and writing in the margins non-destructively.

Then comes the hard part: Apple has to make this run and run well on an ARM processor without putting an undue strain on the battery.

If Apple pulls this off, they can do for textual publishing what the iTunes Store did for music publishing, and they can use the iTunes Store to do it.

TechDud, if you had even one nopad ( it takes 10 nopads to make a clue) you would realize that people who are "playing" with a mac today .... are tomorrows customers, but I guess that's a concept too sophisticated for your tiny, biased mind!

mp3 = iPod
original smartphones = iPhone

Extreme, if you're trying to show us how stupid and irrelevant your posts can be .... you've succeeded! Congratulations.

Try not to sink to that level. Although the guy is wacky to say the least, I try not to resort to that sort of name calling. I know you mean no harm, I'm just trying to keep the peace round here.

When he gets too much I usually go tell him to have a coffee or a nap, it's for the best.

Just another opinion or rumor ..... something else you can share your expert views on.

it depends upon what you consider to be successful. If it is like AIR the launch could look really good with the fanboies and all. Three months down the road sales will tank due to the more rational customers rejecting the value equation.

It won't be that simple! They might or might not have a feature set people want at a reasonable price.
It is not an expectation but rather a realization that and over priced device is not going to attract the sales figures it needs to survive. It is also the realization that the electronics here are likely to be extremely cheap. Depending upon Apples success with the SoC construction there might be very few chips on the PC board. If they can build the PC board for less than $125, including flash and networking support then the rest of the unit will not be much more than that. So all up we might be talking $300 to get the unit out the factory door. That isn't the price for a dodgy unit but rather for a 40nm SoC with two processors and a really good GPU. Apple should be able to easily quadruple the performance of iPod Touch on a PC board not much bigger than Touch's and frankly not at a much higher cost.


Dave

I'm going to posit that there is no chance at all that an Apple Tablet will be an e-reader, at all.

More like price.

Looks? You may want to rephrase that. Explain the looks part for us all. I'd like to see you try to explain that.

So you want your own Apple store just like you want your own version of a Mac computer. Why does that not surprise me? Get over yourself .... the whole world is not all about you.

And while I'm at it, I don't ever recall Apple saying it was considering an admission charge to their stores. Is their a link for that? ... or did you come up with that all by yourself again?

I appreciate your advice, I really do, but look over his posting history .... full of inaccuracies and/or lies, not to mention the same name calling you accuse me of. The reason I treat TechDud with disdain ... is because he deserves it.

Opinion or rumor .... does it exist ... has apple stated it's intention?

Oh you're sooo condenscending yet ignorant. I guess I need to explain something so obvious to everyone but you- I would have thought you much smarter than that.
The whole marketing of the MacBook Air was based on its looks (read thinness) as it could fit in an interoffice envelope. Its whole raison d'etre was that is was sooo thin and light in its weight. It was supposed to make us like something just because it looked like a thin notepad and weighed like a feather. I could care less for the skinny underpowered bitch myself.

Arbitrary and uninformed. Without knowing what the actual device is like, you have no basis for saying that. People will drop that amount and more for a laptop. Surely as price goes up, the number of buyers goes down. But a statement like yours is entirely fatuous, almost as fatuous as the comment I saw below yours that fanboys would line up outside the store. Apple purchasers tend to be as pragmatic as anyone else. Except our equation for "whether to buy" isn't completely dominated by price. Some people don't understand that. Price is their only metric. Some of us, though, have more sophisticated metrics. For you, perhaps, price is the alpha and the omega. I pity you and the machines you must have to surround yourself with.

Hey newbee - i thought you weren't cluless but i may need to reconsider now. It means that they are addicted to posting on their facebook and myspace pages and checking their posts- nothing more and nothing less.

You tell him not to call me a name and then call me a name. Now that's rich!

You're relying on a fake news blog and another one who links to it for your info???
The following quote is taken from your link (emphasis mine)

"Called "the world's greatest tech humour site" by The Register, BBspot creates entertainment for the geekier side of the world. BBspot produces a variety of features like fake news stories satirizing the tech and political worlds, the BBspot Mailbag which pokes fun at the Believers (people who believe our fake news) and much more."

Extreme ... that sinks to a new level of stupidity I'm not even sure TechDud could/would duplicate.

Funny how you omit what DIGG is? Go Wiki it and maybe you'll be enlightened.
teckstud

So explain their large per/store retail sales. Apple understands that people who today are "just looking" and experiencing Apple products .... tomorrow will make up a large portion of their customer base .... apparently you still don't get it. ... Why am I not surprised?

How can you be surpised that I don't get your nonsense? As I stated previously most people do their homework prior to purchasing big ticket items and go to the store and buy them. That is why you rarely see a saleperson along side these punks who monopolize the machines. Do I need to spoon feed you anymore today?

In this case, at least, Digg is a website who relies on a blog for its news
The following is the headline from your precious Digg website.

"Apple Store to Begin Charging Entrance Fee
bbspot.com — If you want to see the iPhone at an Apple store, be sure to bring some cash. Large crowds flocking to see the iPhone and next generation iPods have forced Apple to begin charging a $5 entrance fee for Apple stores. Many analysts anticipated the move, and expect a positive response from customers."


Again TechDud, if you stopped skimming and read all the words .... you would "be enlightened", .... of course that would mean no more Apple bashing ... and that doesn't fit your agenda, does it? If you're trying to show off your wit and intelligence .... FAIL!

I don't have any AGENDA!
Unlike you who's agenda is to bash TechDud- whoever that may be. Try posting something related to the topic of the thread for a change - I know it requires a bit more thinking but try it, you may like the challenge.

So now your speaking for "most people" .... how misguided and arrogant!

You reply to me ... I reply to you .... That's what makes up a thread ... that doesn't require a lot of thinking, if it did, we would never hear from you.