Wired has a fantastic essay on the much-rumored Apple Tablet, a mythical flat-screen portable computer that would be part Kindle, part iPhone, and part MacBook. The consumer press (and Apple-watching blogs) are completely convinced this thing is going to happen, and now that print media companies are signing NDAs with Apple, the noise is kind of hard to ignore.
Wired figures that the tablet is part of a unique pattern that comes with being Steve Jobs: find an old, stodgy business model, update the model, and profit obscenely. It worked with music (the iPod and iTunes), desktop computers ("at a time when consumer portables were the future" came the iMac), cell phones (notice how much phones don't suck anymore thanks to iPhone competition), and retail stores (brick-and-mortar is dying, remember? Hence the Apple Store..?).
The mag does get a little dramatic. The author's also convinced that this amazing device would be Jobs' swan song (on account of his health), which isn't necessarily the case. But the ingredients for the next Jobsian breakthrough are all there: print media are the next endangered species and Jobs is stepping in to save them, save journalism, save their business model and skim a hefty sum off the top from serving it all up through a sexy Apple product.
I still suspect that everyone's missing something, some kind of great R&D breakthrough. The iPhone had an unbelievably sexy touchscreen that most consumers didn't think possible. The iMac very quickly gave everyone high-quality LCD monitors for their desktops. The iPod was a unique application of laptop hard drives.
I spent 30 minutes writing out educated predictions, but they were all totally bland and easily replicated (and probably already written by big gadget blogs or somesuch). Stuff like a ubiquitous network connection and putting everything (I mean everything) in the cloud. But that's too easy. Microsoft, Mozilla and Ubuntu are already working on that publicly. That lets you exclude hard drives, which are expensive components, but there's already flash memory for that.
There has to be some part of the equation that we pedestrians just can't see. I'd sign an NDA to find out what it is.