View from a Farley The Current Events and Opinion Weblog of Chris Farley

The New Digital Landscape

With an Apple tablet rumored to be on the horizon, the first question that comes to mind is, “Who will buy it?”  I’m sure that it will have some educational uses, though a multi-hundred dollar multi-touch device might be a hard sell to K-12 districts.  I imagine it will be great for some businesses.  (I have images of Apple store employees using a point-of-sale app on the devices or building contractors checking off items on a virtual list).  But the real market that Apple will pursue is the everyday consumer market.  Apple is a consumer electronics company that does some education and enterprise sales, but they don’t build products for businesses.  Apple builds products for consumers, and businesses like them enough to buy them anyway.

Targeting the consumer market is tricky because it’s hard to make the case that consumers need yet another device in their lives.  Our current digital world is such that the norm is to have a cell phone or smart phone, a laptop or desktop or both, and a work computer of some sort which I’ll ignore here since it falls outside the consumer realm.  Apple’s tablet, should its existence be more than just a rumor, seeks to redefine all that.  It’s a game changer because it does not replace and improve something like iPhone does.  It inserts a new device to make a more complete digital lifestyle.

My view of the new digital landscape is something like this: Most people will have very powerful desktops at home.  This will be their everything machine, and it might even be a home server.  Movies, TV shows, everything that is on their other devices will all be here.  It’s the place you’d go to manage your media or do resource-intensive tasks like graphics work or video editing.

Next you have your notebook.  If you’re like me, you would want this to be very portable, but easy to type on.  If you’re a video professional, you would probably want something that could do some video editing on-the-go when you don’t have the luxury of using your amazing home machine.

Then you have your smartphone.  It is truly portable, and with you always.  It’s perfect for receiving messages and shooting off quick replies, but not for long form composition.  It’s great for media consumption on a plane or in a car, but not for the great experience your home desktop will give you.

The rumored tablet comes somewhere in between the tablet and the notebook.  It’s for those times when you need something portable and quick without the power and bulk of a notebook.  I imagine this as a device that you carry with you around your home, and maybe type out a few quick emails on.  It’s nice to have the luxury of the larger screen in your home without the need to stay in front of a desktop.  It would be more functional and have more screen real estate than the smartphone, which would make it great for reading articles and consuming media around the home.

I have a feeling that this is what Apple is going for with their new device, if the device exists.  It’s about having more devices, more choices, more freedom, and more portability.  Users can have remarkable power at home where they need it and great speed and portability on-the-go.  If the Apple tablet does exist, it could be a blockbuster product.  It could be, like the iPod, a device that we didn’t think we needed.