Jobs Finally "Happy" With Unannounced Apple Tablet

All the whispers of an Apple tablet PC seem to be culminating in a flurry of rumors suggesting we may see one as soon as next month. Sources inside Apple are saying that Jobs is finally "happy" with the device after being involved in every detail of bringing it into the light of day. As a side result of these rumors, it seems that Apple stockholders are also getting a bit of Christmas cheer with a significant bump in stock price.

Re:Wow

[BlueBoxSW.com]

I like your vision, but you need two more things: A barcode scanner (otherwise you can't scan patients and meds) and the cooperation of the closed systems (GE, Siemens, etc.) that run hospitals.

Re:Wow

[dropadrop]

From my experience during the last 4 years I would say it's not so simple. We have about 50% employees with Apple, rest with Acer business notebooks. Acer has close to double failure rate, pretty evenly divided between models and revisions. Apple has loads of problems with first gen products and very little after the third revision or so. For example we had tens of G4 powerbooks during the last year they where produced, and only one or two went in for warrenty. About 30% of our macbook pro's during the first year after release had motherboards replaced (later models have been pretty good). A lot of macbooks had problems too...

Re:Jobs is happy with it?

[iluvcapra]

Because judgements about looks are an entirely subjective matter. Personally, I think the white plastic on MacBooks looks cheaper than even most netbooks, and that while the MBPs look nice, Sony's high-end Vaios look far better, though neither hold a candle to a good Thinkpad.

I think a lot of designers for Sony and Lenovo are just engineers/technical draftsmen that have a hard-on for Ralph McQuarrie illustrations [ralphmcquarrie.com] and quasi-military design, so when they do a case it has lots of 60-degree angles, accented seams and reveals, and lots of non-functional detail and relief work -- the idea is to make the laptop feel like it's in place on the Millenium Falcon. Most of the designers at Apple are people that are actual professional consumer product designers, they don't know a nut from a bolt, but have spent their entire education on gettings hard-ons for 1960's-era German coffee makers and learning the difference between Zigzag Moderne and true Art Deco.

So yeah, taste. But just looking at my mom's Dell versus my MacBook, I can't help noticing how "busy" the Dell is, and how really none of it is really designed to make the thing more "useful," aside from making it stand-out on a showroom shelf.