It’s Tablet Day, But the Naysayers Elbow Their Way In
I’m reading, with amusement, a post today by Sam Gustin, a senior writer at Daily Finance, called “Apple Tablet: 10 Things We (Already) Hate About You.” It’s clever but misguided, and a few hours premature—let’s at least wait to see what Apple has been working on before we conclude that it’s worthless.
Gustin’s points and my quick rebuttals:
1. The first version of any Apple product will be outdated soon. Yes, but any version of any Apple product will be outdated soon. That’s not a great reason not to buy any particular product.
2. You don’t need a giant thousand-dollar smartphone. You don’t need a $200 or $600 smartphone either. But it might make your life better enough to be worth the money. And if the iPhone is any precedent, Apple’s tablet computer will be far more than a smartphone.
3. You’re just going to break it, anyway. Yes, all of my gadgets have a few scratches and dings. That’s life. They still work. I’ve even seen iPhones with shattered screens that still work. If we were all so afraid of breaking things, we’d live in padded rooms.
4. Multifunction devices can do a lot — just not well. That’s just silly. One word: iPhone.
5. Buy one, and you might as well wear a “Rob Me!” sign. Perhaps, but this is no more true for a tablet computer than for a MacBook or other laptop, and that doesn’t stop people from using their laptops on the subway or at Starbucks.
6. The tablet never caught on — and there’s a reason for that. Yes, I went into some of those reasons in my “Tablet Fever” piece. The point is that Apple, with the iPhone, made a very good start at addressing the problems, and the slate device is likely to represent a larger-scale implementation of the solutions.
7. No keyboard, no mouse, no dice. Hey, if you prefer a keyboard, you can always stick with your laptop (or keep triple-typing on your phone). My bet is that the Apple tablet will have multiple input methods (virtual keyboard, voice, and possibly handwriting recognition) that, together, will work well enough to substitute for a physical keyboard. And within 10 years people will wonder why they ever were so fixated on physical keyboards.
8. Netbooks are cheaper. If you want a netbook. To me they seem like dinky, dumbed-down Windows PCs.
9. Something better’s coming. Something better is always coming.
10. Beware — Apple also built the world’s most infamous paperweight. One word: Newton. Oh, good grief. When are people going to stop pointing to the Newton? For one thing, the Newton was actually amazingly cool in its day—calling it a paperweight is grossly unfair. How else could it have inspired the Palm Pilot and a whole generation of other portable devices? And if Apple hadn’t learned a few lessons from the Newton’s ultimate failure, I don’t think they’d be where they are today with the iPhone.
Then again, I might just be a victim of wishful thinking — we’ll see later today.
