Law Students

No to Netbooks, Yes to Tablets?

By Erik Schmidt

New Mac netbooks have long been a staple of the Mac rumor mill. But Apple has fairly convincingly put that rumor to bed with recent public statements. I’m unsurprised that Apple is not interested in the low-margin netbook market. While netbooks can be tremendously useful, they don’t fit Apple’s sweet spot.

Another longstanding chunk of vaporware, the Mac tablet, is more likely to become reality. Apple has been using the iPhone and iPod touch to make touchscreen interfaces familiar to mass market consumers. Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) will incorporate location-finding and other mobile-focused technologies. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to imagine a thin touchscreen device about the size of a Moleskine notebook.

The real key to the success of a Mac tablet would lie in applications. Rather than scaling the Macintosh experience down to a small device, I wonder if Apple might instead scale up the iPhone/iPod touch experience to a tablet. Zillions of application developers have jumped into the iPhone/iPod touch market, hoping to strike gold. If Apple could give these developers the opportunity to easily adjust their iPhone/iPod touch apps for use with a new tablet, the chicken-and-egg problem of getting developers on board would be solved.

A Mac tablet could be the ideal classroom companion. I never felt comfortable with a casebook and my 15″ PowerBook sitting in front of me in class. Add a supplemental reader or binder to the equation, and you can’t help but feel cramped. But a thin, small tablet for taking notes, looking up cases, and so on would be perfect.

Beyond education, imagine the benefits a Mac tablet could bring to other markets. For example, Houston Neal posted an interesting piece at Software Advice, exploring the viability of a Mac tablet for EMR (Electronic Medical Records).

p.s. - Yes, I know about the Axiotron Modbook, but while the Modbook is an impressive engineering feat, it is essentially a MacBook with a touchscreen rather than a flip-up screen. I’m hoping for something designed by Apple from the ground up as a tablet.

Image Source: MacPlus

Full post as published by Mac Law Students on April 24, 2009 (boomark / email).