SeanJW":3k75zfi8 said:
Ok, basic tablet history 101:
* Apple released their first tablet PC in 1993. Work was started on them in 1987. ARM as created by Acorn and Apple to provide a CPU for them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenPoint_OS was there first. This was released in '92:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:700T , and there were others.
SeanJW":3k75zfi8 said:
This is one of the cases where Apple really is an innovator. They just cut their loses for a while because the technology just wasn't up to the job, and unlike Microsoft, they couldn't afford to throw millions away with a CEO's hopes about the future at the time.
Apple was definitely a serious innovator back in the first 10-15 years of its life. I mean, the Apple ][ was hugely innovative. Apple may not have invented the GUI and mouse, but Jobs' single-minded focus on putting them together into a working, saleable package was huge, even if the first version (the Lisa) fell flat. Totally agree. And the Newton may not have been first, but it tried to do some really hard things and solve difficult problems. It was totally ahead of its time.
Since Jobs came back, though, it kind of seems like Apple has been more focused on releasing "masterpiece" versions of things that already exist than on blazing new trails. They but on Unix, they built on the Next development framework, they switched to off-the-shelf Intel CPUs and other straightforward PC components, they released an MP3 player that was a bit late but was immaculate.
SeanJW":3k75zfi8 said:
It's also one of the cases where Bill Gates was right about the importance of tablets - he always saw it as the future. Just MS's execution of it so far has pretty much sucked because they're coming at it from their desktop/mouse-replacement legacy.
I'd say there's a couple issues Microsoft ran into with Tablet PC, which had some good point.
1. Working with a full-blown x86 Windows PC is a problem. There's a ton of things you have to jam in that small box, and making it a tablet actually requires
more resources than a normal PC. The net effect was that Tablet PCs were chunky, slow, and usually suffering from terrible battery life. Worse, there usually weren't tablet versions of apps, because all the Windows software already ran on it, so most apps were clunky. Apple had a better choice of base platforms, and also better timing -- which wasn't a coincidence, because Apple tends to keep things under wraps until they think it's good enough to ship.
2. Microsoft was trying to solve real-world data entry problems, hence the pen. They wanted something you could use to easily take notes with and to perform general purpose computing tasks on. By contrast, the iPad is designed pretty much purely as a consumption device. It is arguably less efffective for data entry than the iPhone is, given that you pretty much have to lay it flat on a table to type decently on it. By coming up with enough interesting media consumption and game-playing tasks for it, Apple has sidestepped this problem altogether, and has thus produced a highly popular device so far.
