Thoughts on the Apple Tablet

Like most observers, I think Apple is only a short time away from introducing a tablet computer. Imagine an iPod Touch with about a 10″ screen, and you’ve got what is likely to be a real winner in mindshare if not market and profit share. There’s been much speculation about this device, including when it will be announced. I think it will be in the January timeframe even though Apple has decided to forgo Macworld. The company now announces iPhone models in the summer and iPod models in the fall. I think new products will hit in January and new Macs in the spring, filling out a seasonal calendar of product introductions. But there are 2 things about the tablet that I don’t think I’ve read elsewhere and believe will help drive its success.

Some bloggers have argued that the Apple tablet will feature the iPhone OS, while others suggest Mac OS X. There is strong evidence that Snow Leopard–with a smaller footprint, more prominent touch-style keyboard, and other features–would be ideally suited for a tablet. But a tablet is a touch device ideally suited for an iPhone-style OS, and surely Apple wants to extend the popular app store to this new device. Personally, I expect another hybrid user interface of Mac OS X that works equally well with both touch and keyboard input. With only the built-in multi-touch display, the tablet will work more like an iPhone with an onscreen keyboard. Plugin a USB keyboard and mouse, however, and the screen-based keyboard will auto-hide to transform the tablet into something closer to a netbook.

I think its possible that the Apple tablet will run a further refined version of Snow Leopard, with even more touch-based user interface elements, but also include an expanded iPhone OS emulator with new integration features. This would allow the tablet to run both Mac OS and iPhone OS apps in the same experience, and bridge the gap between the two operating systems without requiring a third. Another benefit to this approach is that it would not require either developer communities to start from scratch, making the tablet far more useful right out of the box. The key will be to create a seamless experience between the two systems and the elegance of the touch interface inside a larger resolution display. Having rearranged my iPhone’s apps using iTunes 9 this weekend, its not that hard for me to imagine having a user experience on a larger tablet that replicates the one on my iPhone.

The second big issue I haven’t yet seen addressed is what I think will be a key target market for the Apple tablet: digital textbooks. Amazon missed a rather large opportunity with the Kindle DX, which they argue is ideally suited for textbooks and targeted to students. Back when I led user experience and product development at Varsitybooks.com, we explored the digital textbook market but correctly believed we were ahead of our time. Still, in all discussions I can remember, we imagined a product designed primarily for laptops (it was the late 90s, after all), we re-imagined the textbook, providing not only the original text but also author updates and commentary, supporting information, journal articles and more. Content would be displayed not just as text and static graphics, but animated, narrated motion graphics, integrated tools for calculations and other functions, and more.

Apple’s new iTunes LP feature is not far from this vision. It wraps a wide variety of features around an album, including photos, liner notes, videos, and more. Many iTunes Store movie rentals now include extra features, just like a DVD. Packaging textbook and related content would be a trivial matter compared to these two initiatives, provided of course that Apple can get the textbook publishers to play along. My bet is they can. Publishers are sure to realize that digital delivery is a matter of when, not if, and with Amazon and Google’s book scanning projects well underway, at least one large publisher is likely ready to make a bold leap in digital textbooks. Others will follow. Apple can provide an easy-to-use turnkey solution for publishers including a storefront, for as little as a 30% cut of the take, just as they have with iPhone apps. In-app publishing, subscription models and other new or likely to be introduced features will be extremely appealing to publishers.

Those publishers also know how successful Apple is with students these days. They know full well that if a product works seamlessly with iTunesU, as well as the iPods and iPhones that are virtually ubiquitous on campus, students are likely to buy an Apple tablet in large quantities. If iTunes Textbooks work on Macs and iPhones but are optimized for a new Apple tablet, they would have a huge installed hardware base with a company students love, a business model that lowers cost without requiring significant new sources of capital and might actually improve margins, and a potential strategy for remaining relevant in the face of severe market pressures.

So like many, I expect an Apple tablet to be introduced, and for it to appear in January, run a hybrid Mac/iPhone OS, and to really target digital textbooks (or more broadly, digital learning) as a key market. Time will tell how on or off the mark I am.

PS–I also think an Apple tablet will be the event that causes Apple to remove the “hobby” tag from Apple TV. In addition to having a Remote app like that for the iPhone OS, the new tablet may very well use Bonjour networking, Back-to-my-Mac and other existing features to essentially make the tablet a front end to the Apple TV and maybe even the Time Capsule, essentially creating an InHome Cloud solution.