Posted on 10/04/2009 6:43:29 PM PDT by Swordmaker
The focus of Apple's long-rumored tablet device could be the transformation of newspapers, magazines and other print media, a new rumor suggests.
With anonymous information from people within various facets of the publishing world, Gizmodo has said that Apple has been reaching out to print publications about putting their products for sale on iTunes via a new piece of hardware. The report cited people familiar with The New York Times, publishers McGraw Hill and Oberlin Press, and a trip that "several executives from one of the largest magazine groups" took to the company's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters.
Apple's tablet has been through a number of different iterations, and the project has been reset numerous times by company co-founder Steve Jobs. The report said that Jobs was presented with a tablet device that ran a modified version of OS X years ago, but the device was shelved because the company could not determine what use people would have for the hardware.
The focus of the hardware now is said to not be the playback of media, which the iPod and iPhone lines already handle well. Instead, Apple is reportedly working to have publishers place their print content on iTunes.
"The eventual goal is to have publishers create hybridized content that draws from audio, video, interactive graphics in books, magazines and newspapers, where paper layouts would be static," the report said. "And with release dates for Microsoft's Courier set to be quite far away and Kindle stuck with relatively static e-ink, it appears that Apple is moving towards a pole position in distribution of this next-generation print content. First, it'll get its feet wet with more basic repurposing of the stuff found on dead trees today."
Gizmodo also corroborates what sources have told AppleInsider -- that the device will debut in early 2010.
Two people from The New York Times were allegedly contacted by Apple in June about putting their product on a "new device." And McGraw Hilll and Oberlin Press are said to be working to put their textbooks on iTunes, possibly in a DRMed format that would allow use for a period of time. And magazine executives are alleged to have presented their ideas on the future of publishing on Apple's campus. Given the evidence, the report asserts that Apple is looking to go beyond e-readers, like Amazon's Kindle, to "redefine print."
LOL! That's a neat way of saying what folks in these parts call, "Sot in yer ways"...
Mind if I borrow it?
>> Mind if I borrow it?
I’d be honored!
I suppose - but for actual books, there’s no comparison... fwiw, I own a Kindle and iPhone with a Kindle App. The difference in reading experiences between the two are like night and day.
The flash memory being used on today's devices does not require a trickle of electricity like the memory used on the older devices. As I recall, the Palm III device I had before it walked away, could hold it's memory for about three minutes when changing the batteries. Flash memory could hold it for a lot longer...
"In a recent article on write endurance published in STORAGEsearch.com, editor Zsolt Kerekes provided theoretical computations on the longevity of solid state flash drives deployed in enterprise server applications. His test solid state drive had the following specifications: total capacity of 64GB, sustained write speed of 80MBps and a write endurance rating of 2 million cycles. By assuming that data is written in big blocks and there is perfect implementation of wear leveling techniques, Kerekes estimates disk endurance at 1.6 billion seconds, which translates to 50.74 years."
Is that long enough???
How did I miss that one? Did you put it out via your Apple ping list?
Very interesting -- especially the discussion on how long Apple has been working on multi-touch (which I love, BTW) concepts.
One of my guesses is that Apple didn't completely abandon research on handwriting recognition following the death of the Newton, either. With today's CPU power, the "learn the user" capabilities of the Newton should work much better...
Just did...
Actually, one of the pocket PCs got misplaced for several weeks, and when I located it, everything was gone. OTOH, I must admit that the low volatility of flash RAM has given me hope for the future...
One of my worst "volatility losses" was on a Magellan GPS (many miles of on-foot mapping of a pioneer road -- plus location data on several unrecorded archaeological sites). A stress-crack in the plastic case allowed the battery pack to lose connection -- while the unit was ON... :-(
Double Bummer... ;^(>
If the tablet is to be a reader of papers and magazines placed in the iTunes Store why is a keyboard needed? When reading an actual magazine what kind of keyboard does it have?
A reader with color, graphics and video could be a winner by itself. The only input needed would be to buy the content from the ITunes Store and the content could be moved around like on the iPhone.
What am I missing? Isn’t that what the publishers are talking to Apple about?
How would you search the iTunes store for the magazines, books, newspapers, you might want to buy without a keyboard to input the search criteria? I think the iTablet, if it exists, will be much more than just a reader just as the iPhone is more than just a phone.
I was thinking of a simple scroll device, horizontal and vertical, which would browse through a list of content and select what one wanted. How one would identify himself and the payment method may be a problem.
Seeing as how there were 411,000 books were published in English language countries in 2005 alone, I think that you'd wear out the screen scrolling horizontal and vertical looking for titles of interest. One must have a means of searching for content.
If you could see my handwriting youd know why I say ["ugh" to a stylus/handwritten input].One of my guesses is that Apple didn't completely abandon research on handwriting recognition following the death of the Newton, either. With today's CPU power, the "learn the user" capabilities of the Newton should work much better...
You can see my handwriting if you write me a check, and I endorse it on the back. Otherwise I have printed everything I can't keyboard, ever since I hit college and had to take notes and then try to read them. There is no chance that I would pay money for the opportunity to write in preference to keyboarding.The QWERTY layout was designed not to be efficient but actually to be a speed bump, in order to keep the typist from outrunning the mechanical mechanism of the early machines. I bought an Apple IIc when they came out in part because I was interested in the Dvorek keyboard layout, which was accessible via a switch on that model. Played with it a little, but the fact that I was already a touch typist on the QWERTY system was just too much to overcome. QWERTY has an awesome inertia behind it.
So I don't see handwriting as an acceptable alternative, and I don't see anything transcending the QWERTY layout for keyboarding. The only possibility I see, and the thing that I consider to be ultimately inevitable, is obsolescence of the keyboard in favor of digital speech transcription. The tremendous number crunch capability of graphics processors seems to me to foreshadow that event, which IMHO will be more of an event than a transition when it actually happens. IMHO it will require artificial intelligence as well as heavy number crunching to make it actually work - but when digital speech transcription actually works, it will start raining keyboards in the junkyard.
And the term "user friendly" will take on a whole new meaning.
Sure, I’d like to review your handwriting skillz. How about if YOU write ME a check? It’ll save half the transit time.
Printing isn’t a solution for me. Even my printing sucks. I can’t even follow a straight line.
As for speech recognition: can you see a plane full of businesspeople on an airplane all talking to their computers? Rolling in the aisles laughing at the visual!
I’m not so much of a reactionary fuddy-duddy as to say there’s NO new interface device under the sun that will gain traction. But it’s going to be tough to get anything really innovative established in the marketplace.
>> The flash memory being used on today’s devices does not require a trickle of electricity like the memory used on the older devices.
Minor technical clarification:
No genuine flash memory technology requires any power at all to maintain its contents. This was true “then”, and it’s true “now”.
Palm Pilots didn’t use flash; they used static RAM, which does require a little power to maintain its memory. (Think “battery-backed RAM”; you’ve probably heard that term before).
Instead of a backup battery, Pilots incorporated a “supercapacitor” to supply power between battery changes. The advantage of using a capacitor is it’s a passive device; it never “goes bad”, never needs replacing. The disadvantage is, it can only supply power for a limited time compared to a battery.
Hence the “few minutes” battery change time allowance.
can you see a plane full of businesspeople on an airplane all talking to their computers? Rolling in the aisles laughing at the visual!
Hey, as it is we're getting used to walking by people are wearing cell phones and seem to be talking to nobody.But I would think that people using the system I suggest would use shrouded microphones which would give them the vocal privacy to enable them to "think out loud" to their computers.
Like you, QWERTY is burned into my brain, so learning Dvorak is a "non-starter" for me -- and so was learning to use the "computer-readable font" version of printing that Palm tried to foist on its users...
So, it was a surprise to me when my Newton's writing-recognition error rate steadily dropped -- as it "learned" to interpret my "scrawl". (Of course, at the same time, I was learning what was readable by it, so you could say, we "learned each other".)
So, whatever input (hand"writing" or "speech") we eventually use for computer input, I expect it will be a "two-party learning and adaptation" process...
~~~~~~~~~~
That reminds me of the old joke:
It is easier for humans to learn computer recognizable speech than it is for a computer to learn, say, "Texian" -- so, in the future, folks will be speaking with a uniform "computerese accent"... '-)
~~~~~~~~~~
Therefore, I fully expect that our great-grandkids' "speech" will be as humanly incomprehensible as their "texting"... :-|
Shhhh... Don't look now, but it appears that we have managed to get into the second page of a civil discussion of Apple technology on FR without having the "You-Know-Whos" butt in with Ad Hominem attacks on us as Mac users! :-)
Interesting (but strange) prognosticating! (Is that a word?)
Be sure to quit before you go blind, though.
>> Therefore, I fully expect that our great-grandkids’ “speech” will be as humanly incomprehensible as their “texting”... :-|
Uh... I think that already happened, one generation ago. :-)
FRegards
>> Hey, as it is we’re getting used to walking by people are wearing cell phones and seem to be talking to nobody.
Speak for yourself! I’m STILL not used to getting onto the parking shuttle at SJC... and finding myself in the company of about twenty schizophrenics wearing dockers and sporting nice luggage.
It is my understanding the tablet would be for publications available through the iTunes store. Do you think all of those would be?
Beyond that, I concede your point but only begrudgingly. :-)
I think much of this discussion loses sight of the main idea of the article, that there may be an Apple tablet sometime soon. That speculation is based on contact between Apple and several publishers of newspapers and magazines, not publishers of everything.
Therefore, I added my own thoughts. Others seem to be straying into the general discussion of tablets, past and future, in relation to notebooks, iPhones, iPods, etc.
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