Corvus Consulting

While writing a long-overdue post about the failure of imagination that has been the Kindle, I found myself feeling a little left out of the Apple tablet speculation game, though yesterday’s post did have some of that.

Instead of listing a bunch of things I think the tablet will do, I wanted to step back and try to boil down the design thinking that would drive such a product to market.

The shortest way to describe my take on the still-mythic device is that it will assert a new class of mobile device, optimized for multi-modal content consumption and communication, with content formats that envelop print into a world already drunk on hyperlinked text, images, digital music and video, delivered through wifi (old news) and bundled 3G access.

It won’t be an upsized iPhone nor a downsized Macbook, because either would eat into its siblings. But that we need something in between is clear. Painfully clear, in the awkward poses we strike to use laptops on the couch or the bus, or when we inelegantly share a laptop screen across the table at a café. I can see the Apple tablet stealing the thunder from Microsoft’s Surface years after Surface promised us a better way to work together for about 10k a pop. They thought of it first, but wanted 10k a pop. No wonder Surface isn’t in every Starbucks, but in 18 months a tablet could be.

The deep use case for a tablet derives from an already-shifted reality in the way people use multiple channels to experience content: laptops open while watching TV, trading comfort for the connection to a screen that talks back with the voices of our friends and families, letting us follow curiosity and share moments as they happen.

The Apple tablet, I think, will invite you to experience all these things without giving up any of them, leaving behind awkward device juggling that’s a hallmark of digital cool today but in a few weeks could feel as modern as making your own butter. To the cynical, the ability to obsolete the now is the pinnacle of consumerism. But even for the cynic, it’s hard to scoff at a smoothly flowing connection to a world of interest as big as a few sheets of paper.