So did you catch the big news from Macworld on Tuesday? If you managed to somehow tune out all that phone nonsense, you may just have noticed OWC announce the ModBook. If you can really call this an announcement. Seriously, a spikey-haired guy in a red T. "BANG!"? I think not...
So anyway, the CyBook (new official nomenclature from here on in). It's a MacBook which has been rebuilt with an aluminium top. I'm guessing that after about fifty attempts at cutting the right sized holes into a regular MacBook lid they just gave up and decided to start again with something less brittle.
I'll leave giving any kind of further opinion on how the thing works until a few people better placed than I have had a chance to play with the genuine thing and see how it performs. (I know, it's that kind of attitude that's going to get me drummed out of the blogoshpere...) (That and the ellipses...) Being based on a MacBook is a pretty good start. I don't think they'll be available in the kind of numbers which would make the whole "is this entirely legal" thing an issue, and anyway, Apple's lawyers are probably all going to be otherwise engaged for the time being, trying to wrest "iPhone" away from Cisco. (And that's before the other Apple gets wind of the disappearing "Computer" - I wouldn't have thought now would be a good time to piss off Paul McCartney.)
At $2199 for the base model - about £1135 in real money - it's quite a bit more than the standard MacBook, but comparable to PC Tablets and not over the top if you consider the price of a stand-alone 13" graphics tablet. I hope the participation of Germans in the design process means some form of European availability - I can't find anything on OWC's site which mentions shipping overseas - even if I don't see myself wanting to get one. (I also hope it's going to be more reliable than my old 320i, which admittedly cost me less than half what they're asking for the CyBook but still, even with 265k on the clock I wouldn't have expected it to break down that often.)
I wish these guys luck, and hope this leads to something bigger and better.
Thursday 11 January 2007
Saturday 6 January 2007
I Woz just gonna say...
Oh, yeah. Sorry, but the sudden introduction of Monkey at the end of the last post made me forget to add "one last thing". Probably best, 'cause it was starting to get a little long.
Anyway, one of the possible implementations of a Mac Tablet which has been mooted is as some form of fancy remote control, either tied to the thing which won't be called the iTV, or as some kind of wider home automation device. Now, this brought a knowing smirk to my ugly mug because I've just finished reading iWoz, which as I'm sure you're aware is Steve Wozniak's autobiography. Something which I didn't know (but which maybe you did but just weren't letting on) was that after inventing the computer (or whatever he did) and crashing his plane, Woz then left Apple to start another company building... universal remote controls! (Or rather, inventing the universal remote control, and then building them.)
So if Apple were to release a glorified remote of their own, it would just be so... poetic.
Anyway, one of the possible implementations of a Mac Tablet which has been mooted is as some form of fancy remote control, either tied to the thing which won't be called the iTV, or as some kind of wider home automation device. Now, this brought a knowing smirk to my ugly mug because I've just finished reading iWoz, which as I'm sure you're aware is Steve Wozniak's autobiography. Something which I didn't know (but which maybe you did but just weren't letting on) was that after inventing the computer (or whatever he did) and crashing his plane, Woz then left Apple to start another company building... universal remote controls! (Or rather, inventing the universal remote control, and then building them.)
So if Apple were to release a glorified remote of their own, it would just be so... poetic.
Whee! Here we go again!
Wow. I let my attention drift for a few days and what happens? The tablet rumours return with a vengeance. With the Macworld keynote only a few days away, the ol' rumoursphere (TM) is buzzing.
This time, however, the Mac Tablet rumours seem to fall into two camps. There are those who think that Apple are going to announce a Tablet, and there are those who are speculating about this third-party "ModBook" thing.
I'll start with the ModBook because, firstly, it's more than likely that it is the reason for all of those Apple Tablet rumours (these sticks should be labelled better to stop people grabbing the wrong ends), and secondly, it has actually been announced, if only as a teaser. Hey, I'm a sucker for anything draped with red velvet. The Register's take on this is that it's a modded MacBook (erm, as the name may suggest...) in the style of that iBook tablet from a couple of years ago. Having spent some time over the last couple of weeks reassembling my dead G3 iBook, I can understand where these guys could be coming from. Looking at the pieces, I was thinking how easy it would be to cut a hole in the iBook's lid, reverse the screen and hey presto! you're half way to tablet-ness. If OWC were able to deliver, and it didn't look like numbers were going to be limited, I might consider getting one of these. As it is, I probably won't be getting my hopes up. We'll just have to wait to the 9th to see what we shall see.
As with most "Apple might..." rumours, the rush to explain exactly why Apple won't build a tablet has begun in earnest. Of particular interest are articles by Steven Frank, and David Sobotta (formally Apple's Federal Sales Manager, whatever one of those is) in The Guardian (both found via Daring Fireball).
Sobotta quotes his Steveness himself, answering a request from some US Medical industry types for an Apple Tablet. Of the concerns he raises, the WiFi and screen issues have pretty-much been sorted in the intervening years (this is said to have happened way back in 2002). This just leaves the liability issue, which I don't see as being insurmountable. After all, PC/Windows tablets are sold into this market. Any Mac Tablets would be based on similar (hell, who am I trying to kid: identical) technology and hardware, so things like interference with other equipment shouldn't be an issue. And it's not like an Apple Tablet is going to be directly running any of the really important equipment, it's just going to be used for taking notes and accessing patient records and other housekeeping tasks. And as I'm sure we're all tired of repeating, if anything OS X is more reliable than the Windows alternative.
(Let me just drift off on a reminiscence-fuled tangent. I seem to remember the disclaimer in the front of an old Motorola processor manual - for the 68030, if I remember correctly - stating that the CPU was not designed for use in, among other things, medical equipment. I'm sure a similar thing holds even today for mainstream Intel chips. I guess it's a trade-off between loosing a small-ish industrial sector against a whole world of potential lawsuits.)
Now, Frank's argument basically boils down to his opinion that, even though a Tablet would be brilliant and he would definitely buy half a dozen himself, no one else would so Apple isn't going to build one because there's no market for them. Okay, his argument is a little more developed than that but I think I've captured the basics. Okay, I'm not going to argue that Apple is going to launch a Tablet, but I'm going to suggest that they won't be launching one for completely different reasons. So tablet-form PCs currently only account for 1% of the laptop market (due to raise to 5% by 2009). What percentage of laptop sales do Apple machines account for? I know, it's a stupid argument. But since when has Apple been about following industry trends? I kinda thought they were about setting them? ("What? An expensive, feature-light MP3 player? It's going to take more than great industrial design and thoroughly thought-out yet effortless connectivity to compete in this market!")
I don't want to been seen as throwing random insults at any of the many people who have commented on the possibility of a Mac Tablet, by they all seem to be suffering from "I'm Special" syndrome. Symptoms include making statements along the lines of, "I would camp out overnight in a blizzard to be first in line for a Mac Tablet, but I honestly can't imagine anyone else would be even remotely interested in one." I think that this is a really big mistake. The Mac has always been the computer for "the rest of us", but I'm not quite sure people realise how large a cohort "the rest of us" actually is.
Let me give you an example of why I think the demand will be there. A couple of years ago, the BBC broadcast Dickens in America, a documentary in which Miriam Margolis travelled around the eastern part of the US in the footsteps ofDan Brown Charles Dickens. The fact that it was interesting stuff aside, what struck me was that for part of the voice-over we were shown a reflective end-of-day Miriam sat writing her journal on a tablet PC. To my eternal shame I can't remember the make, but that isn't important. Neither is the fact that her longhand appeared to be being stored as graphical pages rather than being interpreted. Was is important is that here was someone who we can assume to be either uncomfortable with or uninterested in computers using one simply as a tool in a way which was natural to them. Whatever you thought on the merits of a £1500 sketchpad, here we have an example of the kind of demographic we like to pride ourselves on Apple traditionally targeting.
(Wow. Sorry, digressing again, but I've just discovered that Miriam Margolis also did most of the female voices for the English language dud of Monkey. Kudos.)
Whether or (most likely) not Apple announces a Mac Tablet next week, it's obvious from the reaction in the press that there is a considerable amount of interest in the format. And I'm always glad to find out that it's not just me.
This time, however, the Mac Tablet rumours seem to fall into two camps. There are those who think that Apple are going to announce a Tablet, and there are those who are speculating about this third-party "ModBook" thing.
I'll start with the ModBook because, firstly, it's more than likely that it is the reason for all of those Apple Tablet rumours (these sticks should be labelled better to stop people grabbing the wrong ends), and secondly, it has actually been announced, if only as a teaser. Hey, I'm a sucker for anything draped with red velvet. The Register's take on this is that it's a modded MacBook (erm, as the name may suggest...) in the style of that iBook tablet from a couple of years ago. Having spent some time over the last couple of weeks reassembling my dead G3 iBook, I can understand where these guys could be coming from. Looking at the pieces, I was thinking how easy it would be to cut a hole in the iBook's lid, reverse the screen and hey presto! you're half way to tablet-ness. If OWC were able to deliver, and it didn't look like numbers were going to be limited, I might consider getting one of these. As it is, I probably won't be getting my hopes up. We'll just have to wait to the 9th to see what we shall see.
As with most "Apple might..." rumours, the rush to explain exactly why Apple won't build a tablet has begun in earnest. Of particular interest are articles by Steven Frank, and David Sobotta (formally Apple's Federal Sales Manager, whatever one of those is) in The Guardian (both found via Daring Fireball).
Sobotta quotes his Steveness himself, answering a request from some US Medical industry types for an Apple Tablet. Of the concerns he raises, the WiFi and screen issues have pretty-much been sorted in the intervening years (this is said to have happened way back in 2002). This just leaves the liability issue, which I don't see as being insurmountable. After all, PC/Windows tablets are sold into this market. Any Mac Tablets would be based on similar (hell, who am I trying to kid: identical) technology and hardware, so things like interference with other equipment shouldn't be an issue. And it's not like an Apple Tablet is going to be directly running any of the really important equipment, it's just going to be used for taking notes and accessing patient records and other housekeeping tasks. And as I'm sure we're all tired of repeating, if anything OS X is more reliable than the Windows alternative.
(Let me just drift off on a reminiscence-fuled tangent. I seem to remember the disclaimer in the front of an old Motorola processor manual - for the 68030, if I remember correctly - stating that the CPU was not designed for use in, among other things, medical equipment. I'm sure a similar thing holds even today for mainstream Intel chips. I guess it's a trade-off between loosing a small-ish industrial sector against a whole world of potential lawsuits.)
Now, Frank's argument basically boils down to his opinion that, even though a Tablet would be brilliant and he would definitely buy half a dozen himself, no one else would so Apple isn't going to build one because there's no market for them. Okay, his argument is a little more developed than that but I think I've captured the basics. Okay, I'm not going to argue that Apple is going to launch a Tablet, but I'm going to suggest that they won't be launching one for completely different reasons. So tablet-form PCs currently only account for 1% of the laptop market (due to raise to 5% by 2009). What percentage of laptop sales do Apple machines account for? I know, it's a stupid argument. But since when has Apple been about following industry trends? I kinda thought they were about setting them? ("What? An expensive, feature-light MP3 player? It's going to take more than great industrial design and thoroughly thought-out yet effortless connectivity to compete in this market!")
I don't want to been seen as throwing random insults at any of the many people who have commented on the possibility of a Mac Tablet, by they all seem to be suffering from "I'm Special" syndrome. Symptoms include making statements along the lines of, "I would camp out overnight in a blizzard to be first in line for a Mac Tablet, but I honestly can't imagine anyone else would be even remotely interested in one." I think that this is a really big mistake. The Mac has always been the computer for "the rest of us", but I'm not quite sure people realise how large a cohort "the rest of us" actually is.
Let me give you an example of why I think the demand will be there. A couple of years ago, the BBC broadcast Dickens in America, a documentary in which Miriam Margolis travelled around the eastern part of the US in the footsteps of
(Wow. Sorry, digressing again, but I've just discovered that Miriam Margolis also did most of the female voices for the English language dud of Monkey. Kudos.)
Whether or (most likely) not Apple announces a Mac Tablet next week, it's obvious from the reaction in the press that there is a considerable amount of interest in the format. And I'm always glad to find out that it's not just me.
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