January 10, 2010
OK, Apple. The gauntlet is thrown.
My headline from CES was all about pre-Apple drumroll. Dozens and dozens of tablets, from Wintel (e.g., Lenovo's Skylight) and the Qualcomm mobile-mafia (smartbooks) and even Android-powered. And don't forget the tons and tons of readers.
Has the industry, suitably tipped off, stolen Apple's thunder?
Or, more likely, has the phone-PC-industrial complex missed the key insight again?
For one, zero percent of these devices integrate a hardware-software-cloud app stack at all. They are gadgets that look like no-keyboard-netbooks, but they run the usual OSes and UIs.
For another, they are generalists. They just do what computers do: surf the web, mostly. For all the wide powers of Apple's gadgets, they always enter the scene as a handy little X-machine. Music, phone, TV.
They look like stuff even Peek could churn out given 8-10 months of scramble. Off the shelf software, some novel mechanicals, a little tweaking to the app experiences of existing PC software + and web apps.
So that's my prediction for this week's Apple announcement. If I'm wrong, then here is another prediction: Apple is dead. The iPhone is headed for the commodity trash heap (Android makes that a fait accompli) and if the tablet can't be a next act, then the iPod-iPhone-powered decade we just left will be the epitaph on a great run for Jobs.
My scorecard
PCs - Apple was first, won early, then lost
Laptops - Apple was first, but Wintel's strength in PCs translated over
Handheld computing - Palm was first, but Apple's iPod-iPhone punch was a mid-game winner
The next great era (tablets? TVs?) - TBD
