Today I saw the wonderful burlesque on Gizmodo called the MacBook Aircraft and when thought about it and showed it to a couple of my friends it became obvious. Apple fans hoping for two things for the last couple of years a phone and a tablet. So we got the phone last year everyone likes it it became a big success for apple so why not a tablet?
The macbook “aircraft” shows why. if you gonna make a tablet with Mac OS X like on any other macbook, you will have to make compromises, and so you can’t make it suitable for everybody so the press end the costumers will start to complain because, this or that doesn’t work as they are just to it.
The interface of the desktop version OS X is designed for pointer use, so are the buttons the menus and all the other elements. This will not work with a touchscreen. And do you really want to use a pen, I lost so many PDA pens, so not really.
I think that if we will see a tablet in the future than it will be a device evolved from the iPhone and not from the desktop version, the expectations on such a system are to predetermined, due to our experience with this kind of interfaces. But if the concept is completely focused on mobile interaction then also our expectation are different. And it might just be accepted.
I think that apple wants to avoid the mistake Microsoft made with Win CE and its successors so far, by trying to provide the same feature set, look and feel from a Desktop Interface with large display, keyboard and mouse to a mobile device with its very limited capabilities. Apple was going the easy way here, seeing what mistake were made by MS and avoiding them.
The conclusion for me is don’t try to make something that suit everybody and if something is just not right, sit back and find out if you are still working on a use case or if you are trying to solve a problem nobody really has.
Cheers
Jens