Hasta La Gadget!

Some people want the Apple Tablet to run Mac OS X’s user interface. Others think its UI will be something exotic. Both camps are wrong: The iPhone started a UI revolution, and the tablet is just step two. Here’s why.

If you are talking hardware, you can speculate about many different features. But when it comes to the fabled Apple Tablet, there are basically three user interface camps at war. On one side there are the people who think that a traditional GUI—one built on windows, folders and the old desktop metaphor—is the only way to go for a tablet. You know, like with the Microsoft Windows-based tablets, and the new crop of touchscreen laptops.

In another camp, there are the ones who are dreaming about magic 3D interfaces and other experimental stuff, thinking that Apple would come up with a wondrous new interface that nobody can imagine now, one that will bring universal love, world peace and pancakes for everyone—even while Apple and thousands of experts have explored every UI option imaginable for decades.

And then there’s the third camp, in which I have pitched my tent, who says that the interface will just be an evolution of an existing user interface, one without folders and windows, but with applications that take over the entire screen. A “modal” user interface that has been proven in the market battlefield, and that has brought a new form of computing to every normal, non-computer-expert consumer.

Yes, people, I’m afraid that the tablet will just run a sightly modified version of the iPhone OS user interface. And you should be quite happy about it, as it’s the culmination of a brilliant idea proposed by a slightly nutty visionary genius, who died in 2005 without ever seeing the rise of the JesusPhone.

This guy’s name was Jef Raskin.

The incredible morphing computer

Raskin was the human interface expert who lead the Macintosh project until Steve Jobs—the only guy whose gigantic ego rivaled Raskin’s—kicked him out. During his time at Apple, Raskin worked on a user interface idea called the “information appliance,” a concept that was later bastardized by the Larry Ellisons and Ciscos of this world.

In Raskin’s head, an information appliance would be a computing device with one single purpose—like a toaster makes toast, and a microwave oven heats up food. This gadget would be so easy to use that anyone would be able to grab it, and start playing with it right away, without any training whatsoever. It would have the right number of buttons, in the right position, with the right software. In fact, an information appliance—which was always networked—would be so easy to use that it would become invisible to the user, just part of his or her daily life.

Sound familiar? Not yet? Well, now consider this. Later in his life, Raskin realized that, while his idea was good, people couldn’t carry around one perfectly designed information appliance for every single task they can think of. Most people were already carrying a phone, a camera, a music player, a GPS and a computer. They weren’t going to carry any more gadgets with them.

He saw touch interfaces, however, and realized that maybe, if the buttons and information display were all in the software, he could create a morphing information appliance. Something that could do every single task imaginable perfectly, changing mode according to your objectives. Want to make a call? The whole screen would change to a phone, and buttons will appear to dial or select a contact. Want a music player or a GPS or a guitar tuner or a drawing pad or a camera or a calendar or a sound recorder or whatever task you can come up with? No problem: Just redraw the perfect interface on the screen, specially tailored for any of those tasks. So easy that people would instantly get it.

Now that sounds familiar. It’s exactly what the iPhone and other similar devices do. And like Raskin predicted, everyone gets it, which is why Apple’s gadget has experienced such a raging success. That’s why thousands of applications—which perform very specialized tasks—get downloaded daily.

The impending death of the desktop computer

Back in the ’80s, however, this wasn’t possible. The computing power wasn’t there, and touch technology as we know it didn’t even exist.

During those years, Raskin wanted the information appliance concept to be the basis of the Mac but, as we know, the Macintosh evolved into a multiple purpose computer. It was a smart move, the only possible one. It would be able to perform different tasks, and the result was a lot simpler than the command-line based Apple II or IBM PC. It used the desktop metaphor, a desk with folders to organize your documents. That was a level of abstraction that was easier to understand than typing “dir” or “cd” or “cls.”

However, the desktop metaphor still required training. It further democratized computing, but despite its ease of use, many people then and today still find computers difficult to use. In fact, now they are even harder to use than before, requiring a longer learning curve because the desktop metaphor user interface is now more complex (and abstract) than ever before. People “in the know” don’t appreciate the difficulty of managing Mac OS X or Windows, but watching some of my friends deal with their computers make it painfully obvious: Most people are still baffled with many of the conventions that some of us take for granted. Far from decreasing over time, the obstacles to learning the desktop metaphor user interface have increased.

What’s worse, the ramping-up in storage capability and functionality has made the desktop metaphor a blunder more than an advantage: How could we manage the thousands of files that populate our digital lives using folders? Looking at my own folder organization, we can barely, if at all. Apple and Microsoft have tried to tackle this problem with database-driven software like iPhoto or iTunes. Instead of managing thousands of files “by hand,” that kind of software turns the computer into an “information appliance,” giving an specialized interface to organize your photos or music.

That’s still imperfect, however, and—while easier than the navigate-through-a-zillion-folders alternative—we still have to live with conventions that are hard to understand for most people.

The failure of the Windows tablet

As desktop computing evolved and got more convoluted, other things were happening. The Newton came up, drawing from Raskin’s information appliance concept. It had a conservative morphing interface, it was touch sensitive, but it ended being the first Personal Digital Assistant and died, killed by His Steveness.

Newton—and later the Palm series—also ran specialized applications, and could be considered the proto-iPhone or the proto-Tablet. But it failed to catch up thanks to a bad start, a monochrome screen, the lack of always-connected capabilities, and its speed. It was too early and the technology wasn’t there yet.

When the technology arrived, someone else had a similar idea: Bill Gates thought the world would run on tablets one day, and he wanted them to run Microsoft software. The form may have been right, but the software concept was flawed from the start: He tried to adapt the desktop metaphor to the tablet format.

Instead of creating a completely new interface, closer to Raskin’s ideas, Gates adapted Windows to the new format, adding some things here and there, like handwriting recognition, drawing and some gestures—which were pioneered by the Newton itself. That was basically it. The computer was just the same as any other laptop, except that people would be able to control it with a stylus or a single finger.

Microsoft Windows tablets were a failure, and they became a niche device for doctors and nurses. The concept never took off at the consumer level because people didn’t see any advantage on using their good old desktop in a tablet format which even was more expensive than regular laptops.

The rise of the iPhone

So why would Apple create a tablet, anyway? The answer is in the iPhone.

While Bill Gates’ idea of a tablet was a market failure, it achieved one significant success: It demonstrated that transferring a desktop user interface to a tablet format was a horrible idea, destined to fail. That’s why Steve Jobs was never interested. Something very different was needed, and that came in the form of a phone.

The iPhone is the information appliance that Raskin imagined at the end of his life: A morphing machine that could do any task using any specialized interface. Every time you launch an app, the machine transforms into a new device, showing a graphical representation of its interface. There are specialized buttons for taking pictures, and gestures to navigate through them. Want to change a song? Just click the “next” button. There are keys to press phone numbers, and software keyboards to type short messages, chat, email or tweet. The iPhone could take all these personalities, and be successful in all of them.

When it came out, people instantly got this concept. Clicking icons transformed their new gadget into a dozen different gadgets. Then, when the app store appeared, their device was able to morph into an unlimited number of devices, each serving one task.

In this new computing world there were no files or folders, either. Everything was database-driven. The information was there, in the device, or out there, floating in the cloud. You could access it all through all these virtual gadgets, at all times, because the iPhone is always connected.

I bet that Jobs and others at Apple saw the effect this had on the consumer market, and instantly thought: “Hey, this thing changes everything. It is like the new Mac after the Apple II.” A new computing paradigm for normal consumers, from Wilson’s Mac-and-PC-phobic step-mom to my most computer-illiterate friends. One that could be adopted massively if priced right. A new kind of computer that, like the iPhone, could make all the things that consumers—not professionals, or office people—do with a regular computers a lot easier.

This was the next step after the punching card, the command line, and the graphical desktop metaphor. It actually feels like something Captain Picard would use.

Or, at least, that’s how the theory goes.

Stretching the envelope

For the tablet revolution to happen, however, the iPhone interface will need to stretch in a few new directions. Perhaps the most important and difficult user interface problem is the keyboard. Quite simply, how will we type on the thing? It’s not as easy as making the iPhone keyboard bigger. You can read our analysis of the potential solutions here. The other issues involved are:

• How would Apple and the app developers deal with the increased resolution?
• How would Apple deal with multitasking that, in theory, would be easier with the increased power of a tablet?
• Where would Apple place the home button?

The resolution dilemma

The first question has an easy answer from a marketing and development perspective.

At the marketing level, it would be illogical to waste the power that the sheer number of iPhone/iPod Touch applications give to this platform. Does this mean that the Apple Tablet would run the same applications as the iPhone, just bigger, at full screen?

This is certainly a possibility if the application doesn’t contain a version of its user interface specifically tailored for the increased screen real state. It’s also the easiest one to implement. The other possibility is that, in the case the application is not ready for the extra pixel space, it may run alongside other applications running at 320 x 240 pixels.

Here is a totally made-up example of home-screen icons and apps running on a tablet at full screen:

However, this would complicate the user interface way too much. My logical guess is that, if the app interface is not Tablet-ready, it would run at full screen. That’s the cheapest option for everyone, and it may not even be needed in most cases: If the rumors are true, there will be a gap between the announcement of the device and the actual release. This makes sense, as it will give developers time to scramble to get their apps ready for the new resolution.

Most developers will like to take advantage of the extra pixels that the screen offers, with user interfaces that put more information in one place. But the most important thing is that the JesusTablet-tailored apps represent an opportunity to increase their sales.

From a development point of view, this represents an easily solvable challenge. Are there going to be two applications, one for the iPhone/iPod touch, and another one for the tablet? Most likely, no. If Apple follows the logic of their Mac OS X’s resolution-independent application guidelines—issued during the World Wide Developers Conference in June—the most reasonable option could be to pack the two user interfaces and associated art into a single fat application.

How to multitask

Most rumors are pointing at the possibility of multitasking in the tablet (and also on the iPhone OS 4.0). This will bring up the challenge of navigation through running apps that take all over the screen. Palm’s Web OS solves this elegantly, but Apple has two good options in their arsenal, all present in Mac OS X.

The app switch bar or a dock
They can implement a simple dock that is always present on the screen or is invoked using a gesture or clicking a button or on a screen icon. This is the simplest available method, and can also be made to be flashy and all eye candy.

Exposé
This is one of those features that people love in Mac OS X, but that only a few discover on their own. Once you get it, you can’t live without it. I can imagine a tablet-based Exposé as an application switcher. Make a gesture or click on a corner, and get all running applications to neatly appear in a mosaic, just like Mac OS X does except that they won’t have multiple windows. The apps could be updated live, ready to be expanded when you touch one of them. Plenty of opportunity for sci-fi’ish eye candy here.

A gesture makes sense for implementing Exposé on the tablet—as you can do on the MacBook Pro—but they could also use their recently-patented proximity sensing technology. In fact, I love this idea: Make the four corners of the tablet hot, making icons appear every time you get a thumb near a corner. The icons—which could be user customizable—could bring four different functions. One of them would be closing the running application. The other, call Exposé and bring up the mosaic with all running applications. The other could invoke the home screen, with all the applications. And a fourth one, perhaps, could open the general preferences. Or bring a set of Dashboard widgets that will show instant information snippets, like in Mac OS X.

Here’s an illustration—again, totally hypothetical—of what this sort of Exposé interface might look like:

The trouble with the home button

The physical home button in the iPhone and the touch plays a fundamental role, and it’s one of the key parts of the interface. Simply put, without it, you can’t exit applications and return to the home screen. On the small iPhone, it makes sense to have it where it is. On this larger format—check its size compared to the iPhone here—things are not so clear.

Would you have a single home button? If yes, would you place it on a corner, where it could be easily pressed by one of your thumbs, as you hold the tablet? On what corner? If you add two home buttons, for easier access, wouldn’t that confuse consumers? Or not? And wouldn’t placing a button affect the perception of the tablet as an horizontal or vertical device? This, for me, is one of the biggest—and silliest—mysteries of the tablet.

What about if Apple decides not to use a physical button? Like I point out in the idea about Exposé, the physical button could be easily replaced by a user definable hot corner.

Revolution Part Two

With these four key problems solved, whatever extra Apple adds—like extra gestures—is just icing on the iPhone user interface cake that so many consumers find so delicious. The important thing here is that the fabled Apple Tablet won’t revolutionize the computing world on its own. It may become what the Mac was to the command-line computers, but the revolution already started with the iPhone.

If Apple has interpreted its indisputable success as an indication about what consumers want for the next computing era, the new device will be more of the same, but better and more capable.

Maybe Apple ignored this experience, and they have created a magical, wondrous, an unproven, completely new interface that nobody can imagine now. You know, the one that will bring universal love, world peace and pancakes for everyone. I’m all for pancakes.

Or perhaps Steve Jobs went nuts, and he decided to emulate el Sr. Gates with a desktop operating system.

The most logical step, however, is to follow the iPhone and the direction set by Raskin years ago. To me, the tablet will be the continuation of the end for the classic windowed environment and the desktop metaphor user interface. And good riddance, is all I can say.

The Wall Street Journal just laid out a doozy of an Apple tablet rumor piece, all from anonymous sources, “people familiar with the matter,” and the like. There’s a lot to go through, so without further ado:

• The tablet will come with a virtual keyboard — kind of a no-brainer if it’s gonna be a keyboard-less tablet and not, say, another laptop.
• Apple’s been talking with The New York Times, Conde Nast, and HarperCollins / News Corp. over how they could collaborate. When asked, NYT Chairman Arthur Sulzberger would only say “stay tuned.”
• Electronic Arts has been working closely to prep games for the tablet. We know of a number of gaming journalists who’ve gotten invites to next week’s event, and given Apple’s heavy games push over the past year or so, this wouldn’t surprise us in the least.
• A reaffirmation of earlier murmurings about potentially swapping Google for Bing as the default search engine. Maps, too!
• Those TV subscription rumors? Apparently the gang in Cupertino have been pitching a “best of TV” service that would package the best four to six shows per channel.
• A web-based version of iTunes, tentatively called iTunes.com and potentially launching in June, for buying music outside of the dedicated app. Additionally, there’d be a new initiative “to populate as many webs ites as possible with ‘buy’ buttons, integrating iTunes transactions into activities like listening to internet radio and surfing review web sites.” No mention if music will be downloaded or streamed from the cloud, but we can definitely see how Apple’s recent Lala acquisition would play into this in the future — in fact, we’ve already seen it start to bear fruit.
• Here’s a weird one: Apple has supposedly designed the tablet “so that it is intuitive to share.” One such experiment is virtual sticky notes that launch for the intended recipient by facial recognition via built-in camera.

If nothing else, we’re really looking forward to next week putting a large clamp on the torrent of tablet rumors that have have propagated the internet for the last few months.

WSJ: Apple tablet to have books, games, music, TV, will make sandwiches originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Flash an exotic prototype, then—Presto!—get people to buy your more boring stuff. That kind of thinking still rules at most electronics companies. Apple under Steve Jobs only shows off actual products. The difference? Apple’s arcane secret to success.

A specter harrows the consumer electronics industry: malaise. Like washed-up Catskill magicians unable to let go of old routines while a brash upstart steals their audience, nearly every maker of consumer electronics in the world clings to a quaint song-and-dance about prototypes.

“Here is your possible future,” they bark, flourishing the latest conceptual product from the lab. “Now watch us make it disappear!”

Apple’s chief magician knows better, pulling solid objects out of the aether; products you can actually buy.

If this sounds like a minor complaint about most of the industry’s lack of imagination in marketing, you’re misunderstanding the whole act. The fact that Apple does not reveal prototypes but shipping products is the fundamental difference between their entire business strategy and that of the rest of the industry. It evokes a feeling of trust between Apple and consumers—that when Apple actually reveals a product, it’s something that they’re confident enough to support for years to come.

For the better part of the last century—starting arbitrarily with the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair and its stark, Randian slogan: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms”—the producers of consumer goods have stuck to a basic formula: Show off a prototype; gauge public response; then release a commercial product that is less ambitious, if released at all.

It worked in part because it told a compelling story. “Here is what the future looks like; and here’s an intermediate step towards that future that you can buy today.” Electronics’ sister industries followed the same tack. Car shows were populated with prismatic concept cars hewn with non-Euclidean angles rotating on raised daises. Videogame tech demos showed graphics too impossible to believe, but entrancing enough to betray our better judgment.

But in Jobs’ encore performance, Apple has changed the routine.

Outwardly Apple’s showmanship is competent, workmanlike. Jobs-as-performer wears an understated uniform that does not distract from the act. His humor, when it exists, is subtle. The closest an Apple keynote gets to pomp are pie charts that look like wooden logs.

Yet when Jobs reveals the company’s next product, there’s a critical difference: It exists. When possible, it is available for retail purchase the same day. There are few maybes or eventuallys tempering the presentation: “Here is the tiny miracle we’ve created. We want to sell it to you today.”

As a counter-example, let me pick on Lenovo for a moment: At CES this year, they showed off the Ideapad U1 prototype, a netbook with a screen that could be decoupled from the keyboard to operate as a multitouch tablet. Clever idea, seemingly well considered and brain-bendingly not available for purchase today.

Do you see the story that Lenovo is spoiling for themselves? First, they’ve deprecated the imagined utility of every other laptop they sell without the flashy removable tablet screen. Yet they’ve also whispered a nervous apology to potential customers: “We could make something this cool, but we’re not so confident in our plans to fully commit to them. Maybe you could tell us if you think you’d like this trick?”

Lenovo might make the U1. They might sell a few units. But simply by revealing it before it was a living, breathing SKU on retail shelves, they’ve relegated it to a quirky sideshow.

See also: The Chevy Volt, announced so long ago that GM has gone through a bankruptcy and shotgun CEO transition without actually being available for sale. Bet those will be flying off the lots.

Some of Apple’s peers understand the need to manage expectations. Have you ever seen RIM show off a BlackBerry prototype? What about Nintendo? They don’t pull a Microsoft-like move of showing very early-stage products to reporters and potential customers. They simply pull out a Wii or a DS and say, “This is it. Give it a try.”

Everybody loves a prototype. Engineers get a chance to strut their stuff. If you’ve got a 40-inch OLED TV in a lab somewhere, bring it to your trade show. Executives take pride in their company’s technical prowess. Marketers get an excuse to throw an even fancier party. And customers and press get idyll fodder for a daydream.

None of those things equal units sold. None of those things turn a customer into an ardent fan.

That an industry exists around rumors and leaks for unreleased products may be useful to Apple, but it is a side-effect of their product strategy, not the basis of their marketing. Consider that when Apple finally does release a product, the marketing tends to showcase the device itself in clear, comprehensible ways. Apple isn’t shy to make claims about the grandiose, epiphanal nature of its products because—whether they pull it off or not—they have built a culture in which every product they make is designed to be world class.

Instead of prototypes, Apple makes patents. Although I’m certain Apple would keep these patents behind the curtain if they legally could, their existence proves something amazingly pedestrian: Behind the scenes, Apple is essentially the same sort of company as every other electronics star in the world.

They’re developing prototypes. They’re trying new tricks, seeing what works. They know experimentation is the lifeblood of innovation.

But like the consummate showmen they are, they temper the wooly process of building the future with something missing from nearly every other technology company: restraint. Apple may come off at times as a bit soulless, but at least they’ve got class. And when that class allows them to sell more products that make happier customers, I’ll take class over flash every time.

That the Consumer Electronics Show is held in Vegas is no accident. It’s a derelict spectacle meant to cater to mid-level buyers, gilt with the threadbare trappings of Innovation and Progress, but sending most of its audience home with nothing but a hangover and a t-shirt.

When Apple pulls a tablet out of its hat next week, it’s likely that we won’t be able to purchase it for a couple of months, but rest assured that’s only because of regulatory pitfalls. And besides, there will be no doubt that when Jobs shows us his vision of the future, Apple will be doing everything they can do to get them into our hands.

That’s the trick of it. Consumer audiences have grown wary of nearly a century of predictable sleight-of-hand. We’ve seen too many companies promise us the future, then fail to deliver it.

I believe that there are dozens of companies out there with the talent to pull the future toward us along some retail tesseract. But until they conquer their stage fright, leave aside the vaudevillian antics that savvy, jaded audiences no longer find compelling, and embrace a more honest and practical sort of conjuration, Apple will continue to be the defining technology performance of our age.

Before we get into the rumors, here’s a fact: unless the Apple Tablet cures cancer, global warming and obesity in one fell swoop, there’ll be plenty of disappointed faces leaving the Yerba Buena theater next Wednesday. The hype is that overpowering. But hey, that doesn’t mean we are not curious to know what it will actually do, so let’s get to the latest batch of uncorroborated scuttlebutt.

The Rumor: The Mac Observer believes these are legitimate photos of a 10-inch glass front for Apple’s new machine. Coming from a “trusted source,” the pictures seem to confirm a 10-inch screen size and an iPhone-inspired design (which includes an earphone hole!). In the pic to the side, you can see it resting atop a unibody MacBook Pro’s keyboard for a sense of scale.
Our Take: Naturally taken in the worst possible light and suffering from a strong dose of noise and noise-reducing blur, the photos are close to impossible to verify. Their claim for legitimacy is also not helped by the blatant appearance of a scaled-up iPhone front plate — something we could mock up ourselves if we had the patience.

The Rumor: Actual retail units of the fabled world-changing device won’t be available until June. AppleInsider reports some analyst noise indicating that battery life and durability issues could delay the tablet’s release until the middle of this year. Moreover, on the authority of “supply chain sources,” it has been described as a “super iPod touch,” with a suggestion it might have an ARM-based core inside.
Our Take: It’s well known that the original iPhone followed a similar launch pattern of a January announcement and a June release, but Apple must be equally aware of how disappointing to its fans (and shareholders, more importantly) a paper launch would be. ARM internals seem logical, particularly since the iPhone already runs such hardware, and NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 platform — driven by a dual-core Cortex A9 chip — has made some lofty promises about what can be done with the architecture.

The Rumor: The Guardian, via 9to5Mac, informs us that Apple has been in talks with UK mobile carriers about bringing its famine destroyer to the Queen’s backyard in subsidized form. We’re told it’ll be bundled with mobile broadband contracts — in much the same fashion as netbooks are treated currently — but there’ll be no exclusivity deals on the table so Orange, O2 and Vodafone are all in the running. There’s also pretty firm word that the iWonder won’t be making its UK debut until “later in the spring.”
Our Take: Mobile broadband takeup is only going to grow in the UK and netbook bundles seem to have been popular so far, so it seems like a no-brainer to try and capitalize on this burgeoning market. As pointed out in The Guardian, behind the scenes talks don’t always turn into real world deals, but at this point we’d be surprised if Apple wasn’t talking to carriers about subsidies.

Well, we wanted photos and we got ’em — in the signature grainy style that all pre-announcement hardware seems to appear. The latter two rumors have some intriguing synergy, though: both point toward availability coming significantly later than the announcement, and both seem to steer away from integrated 3G connectivity. We really can’t wait to know — if only to stop this speculative madness.

Apple Tablet rumor roundup: summer 2010 edition originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 05:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re realistically no closer to knowing the outcome of next week’s Apple event than we were a week, a year, or a decade ago, but rumors are obviously congealing around the mythical tablet that users, fans, and media have all but willed into existence recently — and our buddy Clayton Morris says that’s indeed a part of the story. Morris reports having spoken with a source at Apple this morning — prior to the company’s invites going out, interestingly — who said that the event would focus on a new version of iLife, iPhone OS 4.0, and naturally, the tablet.

Loosely speaking, you can see how these would all tie together pretty nicely: the seemingly “creative” theme of Apple’s invite rolls into a new version of iLife, and the announcement of a tablet could have implications for how a suite of artsy tools gets used. Rumblings that the tablet is underpinned by a new version of iPhone OS have gone back months, so that would give Apple impetus to tease it at the same time the tablet’s shown off — sans new iPhone hardware, possibly, which the company has done before. It’s also possible that Apple will open source its entire catalog of software and shut down, buy an island nation, or do nothing at all — but in fairness, there’s an awful lot of logic to what Clayton’s saying here. We’ll know soon enough.

Next week’s Apple event to be iLife / iPhone OS 4.0 / tablet trifecta? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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