Apple's Tablet PC Will Reinvent Computing | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Tablet PC Will Reinvent Computing

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4 pointsmeterplech8 comments

People will be studying Apple's marketing machine for decades to come.

What other company can have a device they've never even announced get so much press declaring it a game-changer?

it all comes down to creating a dedicated, loyal fan base. they created this core of believers in the Apple brand, and that group truly gets excited about any new products

I think that in part it is the fact that Apple managed to successfully re-invent itself and that plenty of people are seeing Steve Jobs as 'larger than life', a person to emulate. There is something of a cult about Apple.

I have an iMac here, it's just another computer to me, I couldn't care less about the people that run the company that produces it, if it works it's great, if it doesn't I try to fix it, just like with any other piece of digital hardware.

But whenever people visit here (not frequently), ever since I got it out of storage the first thing is: Wow, you are a mac user. Somehow my much more powerful linux box that actually earns me my bread & butter never ever gets that sort of a response.

It could be that it is the striking design, or the fantastic software, I don't know. The design is 'ok', less cluttered than most pcs, but actually not all that different from say an 80's era all-in-one machine. The software is ok, but not all that much better (if at all) than a well set up linux desktop.

It's a weird phenomenon. I hope for all those working at Apple that Steve Jobs will be able to transfer the reigns to someone else without Apple taking a nosedive, it certainly looks as though his personal involvement is what makes Apple go. It's a great short term strategy to make your company a cult of personality, but if something happens to that person, or if they retire it remains to be seen what will survive of that.

I have an iMac here too, to me it is not just another computer. It's a 20" G4. The one with the dome stand. To me that's what a computer should look like. It's a daily pleasure to work fronting her. When she must retire, she will be staying around close.

There are certain things about OS X that come from its Next roots. An OS like OS X has the potential to be the kind of seamless environment we've only had in R&D or dreamed about. OS X already has system-wide facilities that programs can hook into, like Undo/Redo. Also note that there's a lot of drag & drop. (For example, you can drag & drop into a Terminal.app window, and that file's path name appears there!) OS X won't get us all the way there, however. For that, you need an OS where everything is a 1st class Object that can be scripted against. Those things have existed in research labs, so we know they're possible.

I don't know if this has anything to do with Apple Marketing. A lot of this has to do with a very slow news cycle in the tech industry.

As proof I offer up the CrunchPad. TechCrunch is just the opposite of Apple, they've never released a hardware device at all. Yet the CrunchPad is getting mentions in the NY Times even though we know only slightly more about it than we do about Apple's tablet.

So I think a lot of the hype is because nothing's going on right now and the tablet form factor has caught the tech world's interest.

I agree about cycles...

>> "and the tablet form factor has caught the tech world's interest."

..like it did years ago. The thing was though no one bought them.

Is the Crunchpad still being developed? Seems they have gone eerily quiet about it now. The cynic in me would say that if they have decided it's not a good idea, TC can always spin it as "We forced Apples hand and made them come up with a tablet, by announcing the Crunchpad".

Right: either Apple (or someone else's) tablet PC will reinvent computing, or it won't. Making predictions about a product that, as the lede says, "though it doesn't even exist yet," is idiotic. Perhaps not as idiotic as the ginger/it/segway nonsense of the late 90s, but still up there.

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