Apple Tablet Rumor Wrap Up

Since the Apple event is this afternoon, and the submission bin overflows with Apple Tablet rumor stories, I'm putting up a few of the more choice links here so we can all speculate for the next few hours. A McGraw Hill CEO confirmed the tablet on CNBC last night, basically saying it is a big iPhone that has content agreements with publishers. Another blogger wrote in with a expectation list for the event, and technologizer had a nice history of fail in the world of tablet computing. Feel free to add your own rumor, speculation, and exhausted eye rolling below.

Re:I was considering one to replace my macbook

[TheRaven64]

iPhone OS can mean a variety of things. It definitely means an ARM CPU, possibly from Apple's in-house team (I've not head much from PA Semi since Apple bought them). It doesn't necessarily mean UIKit-only. There's no technical reason why you can't run AppKit apps on an iPhone, Apple just chose not to include the framework. This was done for a couple of reasons, but the most important one was to force developers to redesign their UI for the small screen, not just recompile Mac apps and call them iPhone apps. With a tablet, this reason goes away, because the screen is larger, and it could easily handle full ports of Mac apps and iPhone apps. If they do include AppKit, then it becomes a third CPU to support for Mac developers, but if your code already runs on PowerPC and x86, then it's going to work on ARM with a straight recompile unless you use any inline assembly. Just tick the 'Tablet' box in the targets inspector in XCode and recompile.

Re:overgrown iPhone / iPod Touch

[lordholm]

The handwriting classifier tests I have seen (included a number of variants such as ANNs and SVM kernel machines), in general faired better than human beings on handwriting recognition.

Re:Apple's strategy

[kevinmenzel]

Having played around with several of the old Chicago builds, I'm pretty sure you'll find that it was labeled "start" fairly early on, at least by the first beta build. See screen-shots at http://toastytech.com/guis/chicago.html [toastytech.com].

Re:I was considering one to replace my macbook

[egomaniac]

It doesn't "definitely" mean an ARM processor any more than OS X "definitely" meant a PowerPC processor. OS X already runs on three different kinds of CPUs (ARM, PowerPC, and Intel), and it's certainly not impossible to imagine a fourth.

Even most of the iPhone OS itself already runs just fine on Intel chips, as any developer with access to the iPhone Simulator knows. I run iPhone apps on Intel all the time (though admittedly it requires a recompile).

Now, the new tablet will almost certainly run existing iPhone apps without modification, which either means an ARM CPU or a Rosetta-like technology to handle the emulation. I agree that the thing most likely has an ARM chip and will run existing apps natively. But we won't know for sure what chip it uses for a few more hours.

Re:Apple's strategy

[trickyD1ck]

Please, watch this [msdn.com] presentation. I was actually impressed by the amount of usability research they put into the Ribbon. Also, data show, that users like it, so enough of these horse laugh comments already.

Re:Apple's strategy

[andereandre]

can't watch it, it needs silverlight.

Re:I was considering one to replace my macbook

[Anonymous Coward]

That and lack of flash support, love it or hate it, a lot of sites have yet to upgrade to html5 for video, so we are stuck with flash. Unless Apple has struck a deal with Adobe to allow flash on the tablet, there are going to be a lot of web sites that aren't accessible from the tablet.

It's not that Adobe didn't 'allow' Apple to install Flash on the iPhone. It's that there simply wasn't a version of Flash that ran on the ARM processor until fairly recently (the past few months).

Re:Touch screen apps has come of age

[bonch]

Uh, complaints are negative observations.

I like how you didn't refute his point about Slashdot's need to bash things as if it's some personal insult that the things exist in the first place. Remember the initial reaction around here to the iPod and iPod mini?