There’s a need in the market for something geared entirely towards consumption and that’s where Apple is going with this. The deals they’ve made with publishers are all about consumption. Amazon has taken a stab at this with the Kindle, but it tries to do too little. Books are the least of what people read on a daily basis. Give publishers a way to get their content, magazines, books, textbooks, etc into your hands on a great screen in full color, toss in a browser, third party applications and an email client and you have a killer machine geared towards 90% of what people use computers for these days. Add to that a way to store documents for later viewing and possibly light editing and you have quite a few business bases covered too.

Immediately after the announcement you’re going to have people complaining about the lack of a hardware keyboard, lack of an x86 processor, lack of this, lack of that. Complaints that you can’t edit a spreadsheet on it, or typing up a Word document is too cumbersome. The response to the critics is that It’s Not For That, and if you want a laptop, you know where to find one. This is going to solely be for consumption and it will be amazing for that.

Now, if they can just keep from selling it for 700-1000 bucks we might have something here.

I’m starting to think that’s for a good reason and the industry’s ill conceived efforts aren’t really doing anything to convince me otherwise.

Apple may or may not release an awesome tablet at the end of this month, but I guarantee you that if it does come out, the last thing the user interface will resemble is going to be a retail copy of Mac OSX. There’s a solid reason for that: The Apple tablet won’t be a general purpose computer. It’ll be used to watch movies, read textbooks, manipulate data and visualize things, but the last thing you’ll be doing on it is typing a term paper. If you don’t have a general purpose computing device, you don’t need all the UI cruft that surrounds it. Purpose built applications will run to make the most of the user interface, otherwise the OS needs to just get out of the way and let people pick an application they want to run. I don’t know how you’d implement the ideal interface for that but I’m damned sure it won’t include a start menu.

Anyone remember Pen computing in the mid 90s? Everything was going to be done with a stylus? Remember how that went away when people realized that nobody wants to use a stylus? Remember how tablets were going to revolutionize everything yet everyone you know is still sitting there with a keyboard and trackball and keeping their butter and coffee covered hands mitts off the screen? Yeah, I do too.

Did Ballmer expect anyone to actually get excited about what amounts to a touchscreen running a bone stock Windows 7 install, start menu included? We’ve seen this before, for 15 years now and this is what they’re showing the keynote of the largest tech convention of the year? What’s the point?

Here’s a freebie since they obviously can’t figure out anything on their own:

They have Surface. Take that interface, make a demo that runs on the Slate and suddenly you have something that’d get people interested. Two technologies that are already there, in their stable, and they could have just glued them together and have it work. Get some UI people to design sample applications. Release an SDK for it complete with a simulator. It’s a product that Microsoft already has but they just can’t figure out to put the pieces together. Tell me a portable 10 inch version of the Surface woudn’t be huge. Subsidize the hell out of it XBox style to get the pricepoint down to 400-500 bucks and you’d leapfrog Apple by at least a year.

Just get it together already. I really want something to come out that gets me excited again.

How is this even possible on a machine with only two cores?

Google Reader just came out with a pointless “like this” feature, for some reason. As if anyone cares what someone else thinks about a post. The only good thing to come out of it is the unintional hilarity of people “liking” that Walter Cronkite died.

MIX STIX.

Want.

Kucinich has long been one of my personal heroes and this is why.