The night before the Apple Tablet…

I tend to shy away from talking about Apple much these days because of the possible conflict of interest issues, but I wanted to say a couple of things about the announcement tomorrow.

Derek Powazek sums up my — anticipations — of the product very well.

The typical run-up to the announcement, with the leakers and the guessers hyping each other into a frenzy until people start trashing the product before it’s even announced (because they’re basically tired of hearing it) is in full force. I’m glad I don’t have to deal with all of this stuff any more, except as an amused outsider. But as an amused outsider, I count myself amused, but frankly, I tuned it out days ago because it’s so over the top and silly, after a while, it just stops being interesting.

The tablet looks to be the creation of a new market segment, and I’m going to be fascinated to see how it’s positioned and how well it does — not to mention how well Apple does it. Right now, we have these broad usage capabilities:

Life in your pocket — your phone, which increasingly allows you to carry your essential stuff around without hauling a huge beast to try to manage it. That this data syncs up to other places where it’s available on your other electronic environments is great, but ultimately, this is about managing who you are and what you do in a portable format. We’ve made great strides at turning these pocket devices into information consumers as well, but the small screen makes that a set of compromises. They are also — bluntly — pretty crappy at content creation because of the compromises needed to fit in your pocket. the thought of blogging via my phone doesn’t intrigue me. The thought of writing a novel on my phone scares me.

Portable content creation — your laptop. Carry your office with you. I remember long ago when I got my first PowerMac Duo, which in many ways was a netbook 15 years before anyone thought to invent a netbook. Loved that machine, and the docks, because for the first time I could carry my life with me and turn it back into a desktop when I wasn’t mobile. I still strive for that model today, rather than keeping multiple computers and trying to keep the data in sync. Today’s laptops have enough power and a good enough screen than you really CAN turn one into a portable office with few (if any) compromises.

Desktop content creation — the iMac, the mini, the mac pros. We’ve seen this class of machine shrink out of prominence over the last few years because, frankly, laptops have replaced them for most people. Plug a laptop into a monitor and you have the best of both worlds, large screens AND portability. iMacs continue to have some popularity because there are times and situations where portability isn’t a feature (kids being a big part of that). Mac Pros exist, but are clearly a power user (or ego user) niche now; few of us really need that kind of oomph.

What’s missing here? There’s a huge class of user that’s never had a product designed specifically for them. Tomorrow we’ll see the first one.

That’s the content consumer.

Laptops are aimed at creation, they  carry a lot of “stuff” with them that are underused by a lot of people, starting with the keyboard. If your primary use of a keyboard is typing in URLs or emails, you don’t need all of the bulk and mechanics a laptop keyboard bring along (not to mention weight and power consumption and…). The iPhone model (software keyboard, etc) work fine here, but the iPhone form factor for the screen creates other compromises that make the phone tough for these people (but great for the “life in the pocket”).

The thing that kept me from buying a Kindle was simple — it’s a unitasker, and while it does it quite well (and I have the kindle software on my iPhone), I don’t want multiple devices to do the different things I want in this usage space. The reason I think the earlier attempts at PC-based tablets didn’t take off was because they were really “laptops in a tablet”, not tablets designed for content consumption — and just created a new set of compromises that most of us realized made them — compromised.

That’s where I think this tablet lies: content isn’t “books” or “newspapers”, it’s web, it’s video, it’s audio, it’s games, it’s text and content. And this device is going to be all about consuming content, and all of it in a single device.

If it is, it’s going to sell zillions. It’s going to cannibalize laptop sales to some degree, but that’s a good thing. It’s the kind of device that I have wanted for my mom, who’s primarily a consumer of infomration and doesn’t need the complexity of a Mac (much less a windows computer).

Would I buy one? Depends. I’m a content creator, and I’m rarely without my laptop. A device like this isn’t going to be optimized for the kind of things I’m doing (especially my photography, I don’t see this as a device particularly interesting for serious photography geeking), so it’s interesting only to the degree I can’t also do these things on my laptop; it’s not a replacement device, but a supplementary device. But then, I bought an Xbox 360 for gaming as a supplement to my Mac for computing, so who knows….

To the degree that this device makes using your content as painless as your phone makes managing your email/contacts/calendar, it’ll be a huge success.

One thing I’ll be fascinated to see, perhaps not tomorrow: how much of what they do on this device also ends up on my Mac. the closer they come to a “virtual tablet” on the mac (via iTunes?) the less I need one, but I can believe ultimately I’ll have one because I do like to sit down on the couch with a good book, and I’ve never really found a way to do that comfortably with a laptop.

I don’t think tomorrow’s device will solve the final problem — taking a good book with me into the bathtub for a soak. But who knows? maybe that’s a third party opportunity.

What my gut tells me: tomorrow’s announcement is going to change things significantly, is going to be hugely successful, and many people are going to trash it because they don’t get it.  This may turn out to be the biggest thing yet. And given the things that have come from Apple (and Steve) over the years, that’s saying something.

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