Apple tablet: more than a tablet

No more than a week passes without seeing rumors of the coming Apple tablet device. Some say it is going to save the media from the doldrums they are in, some say Amazon Kindle and its competitors will all be doomed, realizing they were just frogs in slow-boiling water along the way. And yet some say it's yet another tablet device, nothing more.

I agree with this TechCrunch article.

Conventional wisdom suggests that Apple will not be able to succeed where so many others have failed. But Apple makes billions defying conventional wisdom.

 As for me, I vowed I will stick with Thinkpad through the rest of my life, until a couple of years ago. And here I am typing this entry on my new MacBook Pro. I love it as much as my first Thinkpad, 535. It's not that Thinkpad had lost its appeal (it did a bit, though) nor Windows OS is sucking everybody down. Apple makes awesome products, that's it.

So what will the new tablet be? My prediction is that Apple will come with a big trick or two, especially in the application area. It's not the CPU horsepower or battery time (which even the latest MacBook sucks). It's the usage.

iPod taught us that we can bring the entire jukebox on the road. iPhone finally showed what that PDA/Palm potential was about. The tablet might not be the "third revolution", but that's pointless - it's about making us realize a new way of re-framing our digital life. Even the supposedly failed Apple TV showed the glimpse of life without traditional TV (another TechCrunch article says it will do that, after all).

We are waiting for Apple to make the world "tablet" sexy for the first time in history, free from being associated with Charlton Heston. Apple's supposedly competitors are doing that too, I guess.