I think print media still has a place. TV and the Internet have proven better for instant news, instant updates, so print media don't focus so much on that any more. They do critical analysis, opinion pieces, investigative journalism - things that take time, so the faster new media has no advantage. And the written word also fits this kind of work.
All they need to do now is move off the printing presses and in to digital distribution (e.g. 3G to the Kindle/iPad) to lower their costs and hopefully become profitable again. I guess you could say they are already doing that through their websites, but the HTML newspapers look poor next to the real ones: if iPad uses PDF that will be a big step up. Also people want something so light they can hold in one hand and read, which even the Macbook Air is a bit too bulky for. Oh well, I guess we will see in 30 hours or so.
I work at a print shop and every file we receive from a client is in PDF format. Why they wouldn't use PDF is beyond me.
I don't think the tablet can replace newspapers. If it has internet and you can search then the majority will just use it like they use their web browser now. You said it above about TV and internet. If print media goes digital it will be just like every other website and blog site out there. Due to the fact they can update instantly. I'm taking that from your own rational.
Got to quibble for just about everything you said. First, price point means nothing for a new Apple device. The 5GB iPod was priced so stupidly high no one thought it would sell ... A $500 MP3 player that held a 1000 songs? It began a musical revolution, so the tablet, if as you say, is "blindingly brilliant" will be a be anything but a failure. Even in this dismal economy Apple is doing better than any electronic company, so come on, it won't matter. (And in a year the price will be slashed while the specs will triple).
As for the "failed" products you list, I can't argue with most of your picks, except that the AppleTV is a great product and the owners of the product are fiercely protective of them (I own two of them and use them every single day. I don't think I watch a TV show at the "scheduled" time since I bought one of them). Apple should have been improving it all along, but still, it sells enough to stay around and people that own them love them. The Mac Cube was an idea who's time was ahead of the curve. If Apple did the cube today, with the level of quality that Apple ensures today, I have no doubt it would be huge. The Mac Mini is a decent machine, but its Apple's least innovative Mac... no sizzle, but makes an awesome server (I've been serving up xtremecamera.com on a Mac Mini for years)
NeXt begat Mac OS X, that's enough for me.
The eMate - Was this Jobs? Something tells me this was not his product, nor was Newton. The Apple Lisa? More "proof of concept" than anything else.
I'm not trying to put a halo on Jobs, he has plenty of faults and he's not a nice guy (I spent a few hours with him in 2002 in NYC and he was a huge dick to everybody, including myself.) But there is no doubt he will go down in history as the most important human being in the technological evolution of mankind.
Sorry, I'm a wind bag commenter, feel free to skip my comments\
Quote:
Originally Posted by reliason
The puff piece on Jobs career gloss over many of Jobs' failures.
The Apple Lisa
The Hiring of Scully
NeXT failure to find a niche (it was not started as an OS company, but as a hardware vendor to compete with MS and Apple)
The eMate
The Mac Cube
Apple TV
They also left out some important points.
NeXTs Acquisition of Renderman
The Formation of Pixar
I believe this tablet, if announced, can be a game changer. I have wanted a functional tablet for years, I even own a Fujitsu tablet -- which sucks.
If he delivers a blinding brilliant product, but misses the price point, it will still be a failure.
I can see this thing being huge, but not in size, considering the space uptake of parts inside a macbook. The iPhone was the beta tester. To introduce the world to multi-touch and touch UI's in general. If they could make it 2/3 the power of a Core Duo 2.0 using power efficient ARM chips instead, this thing could be huge. Sometimes in the process of evolution you have to take a step back to take a step forward. That step may be speed. With more efficient programming and H/W acceleration we shouldn't need as fast of processing. In theory.
It really is starting to look like the iPhone came out of the device they "actually wanted to make". Given ARM progress, the GPU, the power of the iPhone 3GS, I think the Tablet at 10" can pull it off. Remember though it's for Mac and PC and will be based on iPhone OS 4.0, most likely.
Apple has to pull of this 10" Tablet with ARM, etc. *first*. In a few years it will blend into the lower-MacBook line.
This will be a significant step. Like I said, if it isn't huge like the iPhone, people will say "Oh, it is teh Failblet" ... But you will just see everyone and his dog churning out Tablets like there's no tomorrow. And in a few years, yeah, devices around the 7" to 13" range, you'll start seeing the laptop form factor morph quite a bit by 2015.
By then the most-selling "Tablet" will probably be a Windows machine. But Apple will, probably, as usual, be enjoying the "luxury" segment and their own business model.
XtremeCamera I think you do have some points there. Some failures are learnt from and that's the whole purpose of R&D. Apple is pretty much a primarily Research and Development-driven company that is profitable and popular.
There will be failures, but they can be hugely beneficial.
I see the G4 Cube failure as something that led to the success of the Mac mini. Sure, it's a simple computer and perhaps the least flashy. But it has had a good run of quite a few years and established, with the latest 2 hardware updates, how amazing and powerful a really small-form-factor "desktop" can be.
Now, this all said, the Tablet *could* fail. But Steve is pretty much in the zone on this one, I feel. I repeat again. It may not start out as big as the iPhone, but it is an important step. And many of us will line up in droves to be the guinea pigs for Apple's Research & Development behemoth.
Quote:
Originally Posted by XtremeCamera
Got to quibble for just about everything you said. First, price point means nothing for a new Apple device. The 5GB iPod was priced so stupidly high no one thought it would sell ... A $500 MP3 player that held a 1000 songs? It began a musical revolution, so the tablet, if as you say, is "blindingly brilliant" will be a be anything but a failure. Even in this dismal economy Apple is doing better than any electronic company, so come on, it won't matter. (And in a year the price will be slashed while the specs will triple).
As for the "failed" products you list, I can't argue with most of your picks, except that the AppleTV is a great product and the owners of the product are fiercely protective of them (I own two of them and use them every single day. I don't think I watch a TV show at the "scheduled" time since I bought one of them). Apple should have been improving it all along, but still, it sells enough to stay around and people that own them love them. The Mac Cube was an idea who's time was ahead of the curve. If Apple did the cube today, with the level of quality that Apple ensures today, I have no doubt it would be huge. The Mac Mini is a decent machine, but its Apple's least innovative Mac... no sizzle, but makes an awesome server (I've been serving up xtremecamera.com on a Mac Mini for years)
NeXt begat Mac OS X, that's enough for me.
The eMate - Was this Jobs? Something tells me this was not his product, nor was Newton. The Apple Lisa? More "proof of concept" than anything else.
I'm not trying to put a halo on Jobs, he has plenty of faults and he's not a nice guy (I spent a few hours with him in 2002 in NYC and he was a huge dick to everybody, including myself.) But there is no doubt he will go down in history as the most important human being in the technological evolution of mankind.
Sorry, I'm a wind bag commenter, feel free to skip my comments\
Quote:
Originally Posted by reliason
The puff piece on Jobs career gloss over many of Jobs' failures.
The Apple Lisa
The Hiring of Scully
NeXT failure to find a niche (it was not started as an OS company, but as a hardware vendor to compete with MS and Apple)
The eMate
The Mac Cube
Apple TV
They also left out some important points.
NeXTs Acquisition of Renderman
The Formation of Pixar
I believe this tablet, if announced, can be a game changer. I have wanted a functional tablet for years, I even own a Fujitsu tablet -- which sucks.
If he delivers a blinding brilliant product, but misses the price point, it will still be a failure.
Adding fuel to the already blazing bonfire of excited anticipation surrounding the tablet-sized product Apple is expected to announce on Wednesday, CEO Steve Jobs has being quoted as saying, “This will be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”
What about denouncing his illegitimate daughter?
Quote:
Originally Posted by AppleInsider
Adding fuel to the already blazing bonfire of excited anticipation surrounding the tablet-sized product Apple is expected to announce on Wednesday, CEO Steve Jobs has being quoted as saying, “This will be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”
Arrington added, "If Steve Jobs thinks the iPhone was just a warm up act to this device, I can’t wait to see what it can do.
I work at a print shop and every file we receive from a client is in PDF format. Why they wouldn't use PDF is beyond me.
I don't think the tablet can replace newspapers. If it has internet and you can search then the majority will just use it like they use their web browser now. You said it above about TV and internet. If print media goes digital it will be just like every other website and blog site out there. Due to the fact they can update instantly. I'm taking that from your own rational.
I've lived, studied and worked in several cities around the world in my 30 years of life. I can tell you where I am now the newspapers suck, for, boy, a whole lot of reasons. People mainly pick it up to browse through while taking their eyes of the screen at work, or at the coffee shop. It's a pick up and throw it somewhere kind of thing, more so than ever in the history of newspapers.
In my country, in the past decade the main newspapers that used to be the vanguard of intelligent writing and reporting have fallen to the wayside with propaganda and all sorts of uninteresting stuff. In the past 3 years the fastest growing newspaper is a free paper that's funded by advertising. Not surprising. The main newspapers will continue to suffer because the government can't control the online space, so the main newspapers get more and more shoved with propaganda. In the meantime everyone's on Facebook every waking hour and it's only getting bigger.
As you might guess I am living in one of them "emerging markets" countries. But across the globe, this Tablet stuff could revolutionize digital publishing, in the sense that at first it will be for the early adopters, and for lack of a better term, the geeks. But in 5 to 10 years... You could see what happened to music happen to print material. Not entirely gone, but definitely heavily affected.
BTW, if you listen to Apple's latest financial report, emerging markets are becoming more important...
The puff piece on Jobs career gloss over many of Jobs' failures.
The Apple Lisa
The Hiring of Scully
NeXT failure to find a niche (it was not started as an OS company, but as a hardware vendor to compete with MS and Apple)
The eMate
The Mac Cube
Apple TV
Lisa wasn't Jobs - he did Macintosh when Apple's management wouldn't let him run the Lisa project.
He did find a Niche with NeXT - NeXT got out of the hardware business and NeXTStep found a place in the financial industry and WebObjects as a web development platform. Enough of a niche to keep NeXT going until Apple needed an operating system. Today's Macintosh, today's iPhone, and tomorrow's tablet all are based on NeXTStep.
He also didn't do the eMate, that was released before he took over at Apple. He took the basic eMate design and turned it into the first iBook.
It's hard to call AppleTV a failure as it's always been described as a "hobby". We'll see where that goes over the next decade as internet broadband speeds improve. Right now bandwidth limitations and licensing issues limit it's potential.
He's certainly had failures though - he got Macintosh right, he got the LaserWriter right, he totally blew the managing the necessary file server part of the Macintosh Office, which eventually led to his exit from Apple. While he found a Niche with NeXT, it certainly wasn't the mainstream success he hoped for until he had a chance to take over Apple a decade later. You don't judge people on their failures, though. I've heard several different very successful people say basically the same thing - "to do something great, you have to be willing to fail".
Who really cares if there are failures along the way when the successes create or transform entire industries.
With all the expectations surrounding tomorrow's announcement, I bet many people, all the tech pundits, will be disappointed because this device will not do enough.
The continuing conflation of Jobs with Apple is troubling. The correct sentiment would have been "the most important thing Apple's ever done."
Let's face it, for the past decade Apple IS Jobs. Sure, they have a great team of employees around the world, but the truly breathtaking, game-changing, business-driving stuff, is so heavily influenced by Steve there is no rational way to think otherwise.
With all the expectations surrounding tomorrow's announcement, I bet many people, all the tech pundits, will be disappointed because this device will not do enough.
It will *never* do enough. It will be laughed at. It will be scorned. But will Apple sell millions of units and profit from it? Will it become a significant part of their portfolio? Will it be copied to death? Very likely.
...the Segway was going to be the most important thing Dean Karmen (sp?) ever created. But it was a relative flop. Sometimes the "geniuses" misread the zeitgeist.
Still, it'll be interesting to see what this thing is capable of.
Jobs told him it was a flop, before it was released.
The puff piece on Jobs career gloss over many of Jobs' failures.
The Apple Lisa
The Hiring of Scully
NeXT failure to find a niche (it was not started as an OS company, but as a hardware vendor to compete with MS and Apple)
The eMate
The Mac Cube
Apple TV
They also left out some important points.
NeXTs Acquisition of Renderman
The Formation of Pixar
I believe this tablet, if announced, can be a game changer. I have wanted a functional tablet for years, I even own a Fujitsu tablet -- which sucks.
If he delivers a blinding brilliant product, but misses the price point, it will still be a failure.
NeXT didn't acquire Renderman.
Steve personally bought the Animation studio and it's IP including Renderman and founded PIXAR where he brought Catmull over to head its Engineering, at a time when Lucas wasn't focused on CGI.
Steve wasn't around for the eMate.
AppleTV continues to grow in popularity.
Any genius worth his salts is frank about the desire to have failures nearly as often as successes. He's stated that throughout his career.
Oh FFS, you'd swear the world as we know it will change to tomorrow!
If anything the iPad will be a computer screen that's a little lighter on the arm than a laptop. We can already read newspapers/magazines on our laptops. It seems you'll be able to twist things around a bit more fancy with your fingers. And for that all this hype?
Comments
it will still be a failure??
steve has never failed
we failed steve
the up coming newt should rock
Interesting perspective.
I think print media still has a place. TV and the Internet have proven better for instant news, instant updates, so print media don't focus so much on that any more. They do critical analysis, opinion pieces, investigative journalism - things that take time, so the faster new media has no advantage. And the written word also fits this kind of work.
All they need to do now is move off the printing presses and in to digital distribution (e.g. 3G to the Kindle/iPad) to lower their costs and hopefully become profitable again. I guess you could say they are already doing that through their websites, but the HTML newspapers look poor next to the real ones: if iPad uses PDF that will be a big step up. Also people want something so light they can hold in one hand and read, which even the Macbook Air is a bit too bulky for. Oh well, I guess we will see in 30 hours or so.
I work at a print shop and every file we receive from a client is in PDF format. Why they wouldn't use PDF is beyond me.
I don't think the tablet can replace newspapers. If it has internet and you can search then the majority will just use it like they use their web browser now. You said it above about TV and internet. If print media goes digital it will be just like every other website and blog site out there. Due to the fact they can update instantly. I'm taking that from your own rational.
As for the "failed" products you list, I can't argue with most of your picks, except that the AppleTV is a great product and the owners of the product are fiercely protective of them (I own two of them and use them every single day. I don't think I watch a TV show at the "scheduled" time since I bought one of them). Apple should have been improving it all along, but still, it sells enough to stay around and people that own them love them. The Mac Cube was an idea who's time was ahead of the curve. If Apple did the cube today, with the level of quality that Apple ensures today, I have no doubt it would be huge. The Mac Mini is a decent machine, but its Apple's least innovative Mac... no sizzle, but makes an awesome server (I've been serving up xtremecamera.com on a Mac Mini for years)
NeXt begat Mac OS X, that's enough for me.
The eMate - Was this Jobs? Something tells me this was not his product, nor was Newton. The Apple Lisa? More "proof of concept" than anything else.
I'm not trying to put a halo on Jobs, he has plenty of faults and he's not a nice guy (I spent a few hours with him in 2002 in NYC and he was a huge dick to everybody, including myself.) But there is no doubt he will go down in history as the most important human being in the technological evolution of mankind.
Sorry, I'm a wind bag commenter, feel free to skip my comments
The puff piece on Jobs career gloss over many of Jobs' failures.
The Apple Lisa
The Hiring of Scully
NeXT failure to find a niche (it was not started as an OS company, but as a hardware vendor to compete with MS and Apple)
The eMate
The Mac Cube
Apple TV
They also left out some important points.
NeXTs Acquisition of Renderman
The Formation of Pixar
I believe this tablet, if announced, can be a game changer. I have wanted a functional tablet for years, I even own a Fujitsu tablet -- which sucks.
If he delivers a blinding brilliant product, but misses the price point, it will still be a failure.
I can see this thing being huge, but not in size, considering the space uptake of parts inside a macbook. The iPhone was the beta tester. To introduce the world to multi-touch and touch UI's in general. If they could make it 2/3 the power of a Core Duo 2.0 using power efficient ARM chips instead, this thing could be huge. Sometimes in the process of evolution you have to take a step back to take a step forward. That step may be speed. With more efficient programming and H/W acceleration we shouldn't need as fast of processing. In theory.
It really is starting to look like the iPhone came out of the device they "actually wanted to make". Given ARM progress, the GPU, the power of the iPhone 3GS, I think the Tablet at 10" can pull it off. Remember though it's for Mac and PC and will be based on iPhone OS 4.0, most likely.
Apple has to pull of this 10" Tablet with ARM, etc. *first*. In a few years it will blend into the lower-MacBook line.
This will be a significant step. Like I said, if it isn't huge like the iPhone, people will say "Oh, it is teh Failblet" ... But you will just see everyone and his dog churning out Tablets like there's no tomorrow. And in a few years, yeah, devices around the 7" to 13" range, you'll start seeing the laptop form factor morph quite a bit by 2015.
By then the most-selling "Tablet" will probably be a Windows machine. But Apple will, probably, as usual, be enjoying the "luxury" segment and their own business model.
There will be failures, but they can be hugely beneficial.
I see the G4 Cube failure as something that led to the success of the Mac mini. Sure, it's a simple computer and perhaps the least flashy. But it has had a good run of quite a few years and established, with the latest 2 hardware updates, how amazing and powerful a really small-form-factor "desktop" can be.
Now, this all said, the Tablet *could* fail. But Steve is pretty much in the zone on this one, I feel. I repeat again. It may not start out as big as the iPhone, but it is an important step. And many of us will line up in droves to be the guinea pigs for Apple's Research & Development behemoth.
Got to quibble for just about everything you said. First, price point means nothing for a new Apple device. The 5GB iPod was priced so stupidly high no one thought it would sell ... A $500 MP3 player that held a 1000 songs? It began a musical revolution, so the tablet, if as you say, is "blindingly brilliant" will be a be anything but a failure. Even in this dismal economy Apple is doing better than any electronic company, so come on, it won't matter. (And in a year the price will be slashed while the specs will triple).
As for the "failed" products you list, I can't argue with most of your picks, except that the AppleTV is a great product and the owners of the product are fiercely protective of them (I own two of them and use them every single day. I don't think I watch a TV show at the "scheduled" time since I bought one of them). Apple should have been improving it all along, but still, it sells enough to stay around and people that own them love them. The Mac Cube was an idea who's time was ahead of the curve. If Apple did the cube today, with the level of quality that Apple ensures today, I have no doubt it would be huge. The Mac Mini is a decent machine, but its Apple's least innovative Mac... no sizzle, but makes an awesome server (I've been serving up xtremecamera.com on a Mac Mini for years)
NeXt begat Mac OS X, that's enough for me.
The eMate - Was this Jobs? Something tells me this was not his product, nor was Newton. The Apple Lisa? More "proof of concept" than anything else.
I'm not trying to put a halo on Jobs, he has plenty of faults and he's not a nice guy (I spent a few hours with him in 2002 in NYC and he was a huge dick to everybody, including myself.) But there is no doubt he will go down in history as the most important human being in the technological evolution of mankind.
Sorry, I'm a wind bag commenter, feel free to skip my comments
The puff piece on Jobs career gloss over many of Jobs' failures.
The Apple Lisa
The Hiring of Scully
NeXT failure to find a niche (it was not started as an OS company, but as a hardware vendor to compete with MS and Apple)
The eMate
The Mac Cube
Apple TV
They also left out some important points.
NeXTs Acquisition of Renderman
The Formation of Pixar
I believe this tablet, if announced, can be a game changer. I have wanted a functional tablet for years, I even own a Fujitsu tablet -- which sucks.
If he delivers a blinding brilliant product, but misses the price point, it will still be a failure.
I'm wondering if he's overdoing it to get us to accept something we ordinarily won't.
Or he needs a lot of hardware sales in order to get the contracts for the media content to follow.
Perhaps he wants to make this device his final gift to mankind and needs to push hard to get it going.
Something smells fishy. Guess we will see.
Good luck there Steve, you deserve it!
Adding fuel to the already blazing bonfire of excited anticipation surrounding the tablet-sized product Apple is expected to announce on Wednesday, CEO Steve Jobs has being quoted as saying, “This will be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”
What about denouncing his illegitimate daughter?
Adding fuel to the already blazing bonfire of excited anticipation surrounding the tablet-sized product Apple is expected to announce on Wednesday, CEO Steve Jobs has being quoted as saying, “This will be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”
Arrington added, "If Steve Jobs thinks the iPhone was just a warm up act to this device, I can’t wait to see what it can do.
Multitasking.
I work at a print shop and every file we receive from a client is in PDF format. Why they wouldn't use PDF is beyond me.
I don't think the tablet can replace newspapers. If it has internet and you can search then the majority will just use it like they use their web browser now. You said it above about TV and internet. If print media goes digital it will be just like every other website and blog site out there. Due to the fact they can update instantly. I'm taking that from your own rational.
I've lived, studied and worked in several cities around the world in my 30 years of life. I can tell you where I am now the newspapers suck, for, boy, a whole lot of reasons. People mainly pick it up to browse through while taking their eyes of the screen at work, or at the coffee shop. It's a pick up and throw it somewhere kind of thing, more so than ever in the history of newspapers.
In my country, in the past decade the main newspapers that used to be the vanguard of intelligent writing and reporting have fallen to the wayside with propaganda and all sorts of uninteresting stuff. In the past 3 years the fastest growing newspaper is a free paper that's funded by advertising. Not surprising. The main newspapers will continue to suffer because the government can't control the online space, so the main newspapers get more and more shoved with propaganda. In the meantime everyone's on Facebook every waking hour and it's only getting bigger.
As you might guess I am living in one of them "emerging markets" countries. But across the globe, this Tablet stuff could revolutionize digital publishing, in the sense that at first it will be for the early adopters, and for lack of a better term, the geeks. But in 5 to 10 years... You could see what happened to music happen to print material. Not entirely gone, but definitely heavily affected.
BTW, if you listen to Apple's latest financial report, emerging markets are becoming more important...
Interesting perspective.
For penance, we should all go buy 3 Apple TVs.
The puff piece on Jobs career gloss over many of Jobs' failures.
The Apple Lisa
The Hiring of Scully
NeXT failure to find a niche (it was not started as an OS company, but as a hardware vendor to compete with MS and Apple)
The eMate
The Mac Cube
Apple TV
Lisa wasn't Jobs - he did Macintosh when Apple's management wouldn't let him run the Lisa project.
He did find a Niche with NeXT - NeXT got out of the hardware business and NeXTStep found a place in the financial industry and WebObjects as a web development platform. Enough of a niche to keep NeXT going until Apple needed an operating system. Today's Macintosh, today's iPhone, and tomorrow's tablet all are based on NeXTStep.
He also didn't do the eMate, that was released before he took over at Apple. He took the basic eMate design and turned it into the first iBook.
It's hard to call AppleTV a failure as it's always been described as a "hobby". We'll see where that goes over the next decade as internet broadband speeds improve. Right now bandwidth limitations and licensing issues limit it's potential.
He's certainly had failures though - he got Macintosh right, he got the LaserWriter right, he totally blew the managing the necessary file server part of the Macintosh Office, which eventually led to his exit from Apple. While he found a Niche with NeXT, it certainly wasn't the mainstream success he hoped for until he had a chance to take over Apple a decade later. You don't judge people on their failures, though. I've heard several different very successful people say basically the same thing - "to do something great, you have to be willing to fail".
Who really cares if there are failures along the way when the successes create or transform entire industries.
Perhaps he wants to make this device his final gift to mankind and needs to push hard to get it going...
It may not be seen as his very very best masterpiece, maybe, but will round out a good body of work, for mankind.
As for whether it is his last Creation, clouded, the future is.
For penance, we should all go buy 3 Apple TVs.
And whip ourselves with FW400 cables.
Edit: Make that ADC cables.
The continuing conflation of Jobs with Apple is troubling. The correct sentiment would have been "the most important thing Apple's ever done."
Let's face it, for the past decade Apple IS Jobs. Sure, they have a great team of employees around the world, but the truly breathtaking, game-changing, business-driving stuff, is so heavily influenced by Steve there is no rational way to think otherwise.
With all the expectations surrounding tomorrow's announcement, I bet many people, all the tech pundits, will be disappointed because this device will not do enough.
It will *never* do enough. It will be laughed at. It will be scorned. But will Apple sell millions of units and profit from it? Will it become a significant part of their portfolio? Will it be copied to death? Very likely.
...the Segway was going to be the most important thing Dean Karmen (sp?) ever created. But it was a relative flop. Sometimes the "geniuses" misread the zeitgeist.
Still, it'll be interesting to see what this thing is capable of.
Jobs told him it was a flop, before it was released.
The puff piece on Jobs career gloss over many of Jobs' failures.
The Apple Lisa
The Hiring of Scully
NeXT failure to find a niche (it was not started as an OS company, but as a hardware vendor to compete with MS and Apple)
The eMate
The Mac Cube
Apple TV
They also left out some important points.
NeXTs Acquisition of Renderman
The Formation of Pixar
I believe this tablet, if announced, can be a game changer. I have wanted a functional tablet for years, I even own a Fujitsu tablet -- which sucks.
If he delivers a blinding brilliant product, but misses the price point, it will still be a failure.
NeXT didn't acquire Renderman.
Steve personally bought the Animation studio and it's IP including Renderman and founded PIXAR where he brought Catmull over to head its Engineering, at a time when Lucas wasn't focused on CGI.
Steve wasn't around for the eMate.
AppleTV continues to grow in popularity.
Any genius worth his salts is frank about the desire to have failures nearly as often as successes. He's stated that throughout his career.
If anything the iPad will be a computer screen that's a little lighter on the arm than a laptop. We can already read newspapers/magazines on our laptops. It seems you'll be able to twist things around a bit more fancy with your fingers. And for that all this hype?