Asus Insider Claims Apple Tablet Is Real 358
CaptainCrunchyApple writes "According to cnet.co.uk the oft-rumoured Apple Tablet PC is actually very real, and on its way soon. CNET claims to have spoken to an anonymous tipster at Asus who claims to be working with Apple to produce the tablet. 'We're guessing it'll be based on Intel Core architecture, a tweaked version of Leopard, and have all the multi-touch, CoverFlow goodness we've seen in the iPhone and iPod touch. All this begs the question: Can Apple turn the Tablet PC into a success when previous attempts have failed? The short answer is 'yes'. Any company that can make a mobile phone with no buttons, no picture messaging, slow Web access and no video capture into the most desirable phone on the planet can easily make tablets popular.'"
Mac user? Who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
Elgan's research on U.S. Census data drives home a point that the Mac vanguard has been wrestling with for a while: The hedonistic, transgressive, radical ethos (and stereotype) that once characterized the Mac community doesn't represent reality anymore. The decline of urban coastal Mac user groups, the increase in the Mac-using population in the interior U.S. and the overall diversification of the Mac community are facts. What's more, Elgan argues, these trends are a function of the growing acceptance of Macs among the American public.
Acceptance? Really? Has Elgan forgotten about the majority of offices that have policies in effect barring Mac use at work, or the Justice Department's recent decision to relax court-ordered restrictions on Microsoft's business practices in the face of continuing opposition from the White House?
Not at all. There is, he says, a vocal, virulent -- and sometimes violent -- anti-Mac movement, but it doesn't negate years of opinion surveys that show a marked increase in tolerance in most Americans' attitudes toward Macs and Mac users. In 1998, for example, a Gallup poll found that only 33% of Americans thought that Macs could perform standard pencil-pushing tasks like running Microsoft Office. By 2007, that figure had risen to 59%.
Growing acceptance means a decline in social stigma associated with using Macs, and a consequent shift in the politics of declaring oneself a Mac user. The more Mac users come out, the more accepting people are around them, and the more accepting the public becomes, the more people switch to Macs.
Elgan's study shows that the number of self-described Mac users in the U.S. has quadrupled since 1998, and the biggest increases are in the country's more socially conservative areas.
Utah is the poster state. Between 1990 and 2006, for example, it went from having the 38th-highest concentration of Mac users in the country to 14th highest. In that same time period, the percentage of Mac users who lived in large cities declined from 45% to 23%. Even more counterintuitive, from 2000 to 2006, the states with the fewest Apple stores had above-average increases in the number of Mac users. And places, like Utah, where a majority of people still believe Saddam Hussein had anything to do with 9/11 -- the reddest of red, the squarest of rectangle states -- saw even larger increases.
Some of the growth in the number of Mac users in conservative areas could be because of migration. And yes, some on-the-barricades members of the Mac community have gotten older and mellower and moved out to the heartland. But the larger trend is simply that as more latent Mac users switch to Macs, they don't need to change or assimilate to fit into the mainstream because they are already very much a part of it.
"The demographic characteristics of the Mac community are converging with those of the mainstream," Elgan says. If you're from a state like Utah or Nebraska, chances are you're going to share a lot with your neighbors whether you're a Mac user or a PC user: "They're rural," Elgan says, "they're religious, and they're Republican."
So what does this all mean for American culture at large?
"Society is beginning to say that being a Mac user is not such a big deal," Elgan says. "What that means for Mac users is that their platform choice won't have the centrality to their identity it once did. Being a Mac user then becomes one of a variety of an individual's competing identities."
In other words, as the challen
Re:I'll believe it... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Illustrations (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I'll believe it... (Score:1, Informative)
Lotsa "ifs" and "maybes" (Score:2, Informative)
I can't afford one running windows. Actually... I am yet to see one used IRL.
Don't see how exactly will an Apple's overpriced version bring the tech to the masses.
And... ummm.. Where exactly is the appeal in the TabletPC?
I mean... hand-held PDA devices - OK. I can use it and hold it with one hand, and put it in my pocket.
But a 14", or 15" or 17" big, clumsy, fragile thing I have to haul around and which I must always hold with one hand when I interact with it (no keyboard to put on my lap, while the screen stays upright), AND the control/input interface IS the viewing interface (so one dies with another in case of a malfunction) - why?
Re:OS (Score:3, Informative)
The functionality?
(1) The MacOS setup is... Challanging for anyone who is highly nearsighted. The moving your head to go between the top menu bar and your window, rather than having the menu bar on the window is a pain. Or trying to move around to find which item is in focus and hence what the menu controls... I'd much rather have KDE or Gnome.
(2) A monitor on a swivel hinge is what I want from the hardware. No more having the keyboard between me and the monitor. I usually have my keyboard on a tray directly under my monitor, or on the desk behind it.
(3) It'd be fairly easy to turn off the touch part of the touch screen in X, if it works to beginwith, so I don't have to worry about accidentally touching it.
Yes, that's right. The main reason I want a tablet is for the swivel monitor. It beats a sore back.
Re:If it sells (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not a fan of Vista, I'm just saying you can't have it both ways and expect that it makes logical sense.
Re:Nifty. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fine, but Apple's handwriting recognition sucks (Score:3, Informative)
We'll have to agree to disagree. I'm a Mac user, but I own a Compaq TC1000 with XP/SP2 which has been pulling travel duty with me for the past 3 years. After years of reading accolades from Scoble et al about the Tablet PC's handwriting recognition I've tried time and time again to use it as a primary input method. My assessment: it sucks. It works okay (but still not satisfactorily) if you write standard prose but I'm an engineer that uses a lot of industry-specific terms, and the auto-prediction inevitably screws up what I'm trying to write. The other big downside is password input: I try to use passwords with mixed-case letters and punctuation characters and trying to enter those using the handwriting input just doesn't work.
As a result, I use the TC1000 in keyboard mode 95+% percent of the time. That said, the tablet input does work well for field use when I can use the stylus to tap buttons to start data acquisition programs, but as a notepad it just doesn't work at that well for me. But to each their own.
The biggest problem I've had with MS's Tablet PC is that it's basically Windows XP with some tablet features stuck on (I haven't used the Vista Tablet edition, so hopefully it's changed). I've always maintained that if Apple was going to do a tablet, in order to do it right they read to radically rework the interface rather than stick Ink on Mac OS X. The touch interface on the iPhone and iPod Touch seems to indicate their agreement.
Sigh (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why can't we have news without the comentary (Score:3, Informative)
The iPhone could have had a 3G radio in it, and be configured to only use it when the user specifies. If you want to get some data quickly, regardless of whether you (or anyone else) regularly wants to do it in your current location, you shouldn't be held up by someone else's idea of what you want. If I have an all-singing-all-dancing phone and I need to download a large email from the office, I should have the option of turning on the 3G and downloading it, decimating the battery if need be. Being stuck at 40KB/s is not fun. Considering all iPhone users have an unlimited data plan, and not all hotspots are free, only being able to download at such cripplingly slow speeds doesn't make a lot of sense.
Video capture? Heck, a decent camera would have been a better idea. Considering Nokia managed to slip a 5MP camera (with Carl Zeiss optics), and a second camera at the front for video calls, into their N95, it's a bit conspicuous that Apple couldn't manage the same feat. Not to mention Nokia also added 3G and GPS to the mix.
Re:Nifty. (Score:1, Informative)
Do you really count those as features when you pretty much risk bricking your phone applying them?
I'd love to have a third party sdk to write my own stuff for it, much like I did for my symbian based p910 before it, but I don't want to eliminate my chances of getting future security updates for my phone, so I won't.
An incredibly brilliant troll, really. (Score:3, Informative)
Ripped from here:
The LA Times [latimes.com]