SEATTLE — Apple has a knack for spotting problems we didn’t know we had. It can leave us wondering how we survived without vast libraries of music and TV shows in our pockets or the comfort of knowing “there’s an app for that.”
Now, speculation is growing that in two weeks Apple will unveil a tablet-style touch-screen computer that is bigger than an iPhone but smaller than a standard laptop. If indeed that is Apple’s next move — the company won’t comment — it would have to show us why we ought to pay for yet another Internet-connected screen, on top of the TVs, computers and smart phones we already have.
Tablets, also called slates, are one-piece computers with big screens and no keyboards, though some models can convert from a regular laptop to a tablet by flipping the screen around to hide a keyboard.
Such devices have been around since the early 1990s, including one from Toshiba Corp. that weighed 3.3 pounds and cost about $3,500. But tablets haven’t seen much success in the mainstream. At the peak in 2007, manufacturers shipped about 1.5 million tablets worldwide — less than 1 percent of the personal computers shipped that year, according to the research firm IDC. Only about one-third of those tablets were for consumers. The rest were used in specialized settings such as doctor’s offices or warehouses.
Bill Gates, co-founder of Apple nemesis Microsoft Corp., predicted repeatedly during the 2000s that tablets were about to take off. He was wrong because those tablets required people to use a pen-shaped stylus to tap buttons or write on the screen, which was attractive in workplaces where employees needed to check boxes or fill out forms. For most people, though, using a stylus for regular computer tasks such as editing a spreadsheet was more cumbersome than using a mouse and keyboard.
No one has given up on tablet computers running Windows; several cropped up last week at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, including prototypes from Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc.
But it seems it will be Apple CEO Steve Jobs who swoops in with a tablet that takes advantage of recent technology improvements and garners the most buzz.
Dell and HP didn’t present a retail-ready tablet because the companies want to be able to adjust if Apple’s vision turns out to be radically different, says computer industry analyst Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates.
“If Apple blows it out of the park, we know that that’s what the space is going to look like for a while,” he says.
While older tablets weren’t pitched as Internet-surfing devices, modern ones will be able to take advantage of near-ubiquitous wireless Internet access, as well as our growing willingness to pay for monthly data plans for smart phones and little netbooks.
Touch screens and the underlying software are also dramatically better today, and we’ve gotten used to pinching, swiping and using on-screen keyboards thanks to the popularity of Apple’s iPhone.
And gadgets — especially ones made by Apple — are thinner and sleeker all the time, making them more portable than clunky early tablets.
We’ve seen this happen before: Portable music players and “smart” phones had existed before the iPod and the iPhone came along, and yet it was Apple that redefined those categories.
Still, an Apple tablet could have a harder time becoming a mainstream success than those gadgets, if only because there is not necessarily a compelling reason for one.
In the absence of confirmation from Apple, analysts have many guesses about how Jobs would position an Apple tablet. Some think it will simply be an oversized iPod Touch, a music player that is also used to view movies, family photos and other content on the go. Others believe Apple is building the tablet with an eye to the burgeoning electronic book market (even though Jobs said in 2008 that “people don’t read anymore.”) Still others position it as a companion screen to use while watching television — the tablet would deliver information related to the program airing on the TV.
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