Two great rumors that go great together

Here's an interesting story from the Financial Times that nicely wraps up two different rumors bouncing around the Apple blog space lately. The first is that venerable totem, the Apple tablet; the second is a new contender for "Apple rumor most likely to irritate Inside The Cult blogger Josh Fruhlinger,"Acer Laptop Battery
some kind of Apple subscription TV service. Supposedly several networks are being wooed for the latter, including CBS (which owns the CW) and Disney (which owns ABC, ESPN, and a number of cable stations). Conspicuously absent is NBC, newly acquired by Cablevision, whose very existence is threatened by the idea of an over-the-Internet TV delivery medium.

The link between the two is supplied by Morgan Stanley analyst Kathryn Huberty: "The driver behind it [the tablet] will be content." The idea is that people will have to be talked into buying this tablet doodad, because it will be expensive (or will perhaps be subsidized by an expensive monthly wireless bill), and it won't actually be very good at being a computer (too small, no keyboard) or a phone (too big), so Apple will have to have a bunch of cool stuff for it out of the gate. Like TV shows, that you can subscribe to! And watch on the crystal clear, uh, 10-inch screen!

Here's the problem with the idea of watching TV on a tablet: the whole trend in American home video has been the big screen. You can't walk into Best Buy without being assaulted by an array of enormous flatscreens. Acer BTP-550P Battery, Acer BTP-73E1 Battery, Why would someone who's gotten used to watching TV on the 50-inch set in their living room switch to watching on a 10-inch tablet in their lap in the den? Is it really so inconvenient to walk from one room to the other? What upsurge there's been in watching on really small screens, like the iPod Touch and iPhone, can be credited entirely to the convenience of the latter. When I get on a bus tomorrow to go to New York for Christmas, I'll be watching downloaded TV shows on my phone -- not because the screen is great, but because I can fit the phone in my pocket. A tablet doesn't have that sort of portability.

Now, other rumors about this TV service have it hooking in to anywhere you have iTunes -- especially Apple TV,laptop battery which is already positioned in the living room (though not in many living rooms). I just don't see it as a selling point for a tablet.

Pundits already covering their behinds over Apple Tablet success

Tech punditry seems to be a remarkably consequence-free career. John Gruber may regularly serve up claim chowder in the wake of major Apple announcements, but few writers ever seem to suffer major blows to their reputation when they wildly mispredict the future course of events.

Nevertheless, it seems that some writers do have a conscience on this issue. For instance, it obviously nags at TechCrunch's MG Siegler that he dismissed the iPhone before it even arrived in 2007; he gave the world the Christmas present of extended apologia for this error, combined with a glowing assessment of the coming Apple Tablet, in an attempt to not make the same mistake twice.

BusinessWeek's Arik Hesseldahl has been scouring the vaults and has found quite a few instances of those who refused to acknowledge the iPhone's greatness in advance of its arrival. He too takes the lesson that the coming Tablet, mysterious as its appeal might be to us in these pre-Tablet days, should be treated with reverence and respect, because it's going to do something totally awesome that we can't even visualize yet.

I didn't have an Apple blog in 2007,Acer BTP-550P Battery, Acer BTP-73E1 Battery, so you're just going to have to take me at my word when I tell you that I was pretty sure that the iPhone was going to be a monster hit. My thinking was that Apple would take something that already had a niche in most people's lives -- a cell phone -- and it make much, much better. Acer BTP-73E1 Battery, I stand on this solid track record when I tell you that I don't think the Apple Tablet will change the world in this way, simply because it has the much more ambitious task of creating a niche that doesn't quite exist as of yet. (For a perfectly good product will a similar dilemma, see the Apple TV.) I may be an Apple fanboy, but I certainly don't think the company is immune to failure; Forbes conveniently collected the instances when Apple failed, for your edification.

If by the end of next year the Apple Tablet has changed the way we all think about tablet computing, you may feel free to dig up this particular piece of claim chowder and feed it to me. I don't necessarily think such a product will be a terrible flop; I just doubt that it'll be a monster hit. The problem is that it's already a monster hit before it's arrived; anything short of that lead-in will backlash onto the company, and hard.

So if the second biggest question about the Apple tablet, as I posited Wednesday, is how it will wirelessly connect, then the answer that's brewing may be interesting. According to rumors picked up by Fox News, Apple is still, just a week before the roll-out, in negotiations with both AT&T and Verizon, and may be planning on offering two versions of the tablet, one for each network.

This is certainly a departure from the iPhone sales model, which has AT&T as an exclusive U.S. carrier -- but then, that model hasn't been without its kinks for Apple. The advantages are fairly clear: there only needs to be one model of the iPhone (which, coincidentally, is the model sold outside the U.S.), and presumably Apple extracted concessions out of AT&T in return for the exclusive partnerships. The reasons Apple might for its next product aim to spread itself around are equally clear: there are a number of people dissatisfied with AT&T's service,Acer BTP-550P Battery, Acer BTP-73E1 Battery, and Verizon's data network has a good reputation.

Here's another good reason to offer it on both networks, though: one of the biggest barriers for buying this gadget will be the cost, not just of the tablet itself, but of the monthly charge for a wireless data plan. If customers can bundle the package with an existing wireless plan,Acer BTP-550P Battery, adding it as just another line item on the phone bill they already get from AT&T or Verizon, then that makes it a little easier to swallow. It's great to dip into Verizon's customer base in this way, but Apple would also want to keep a hold on AT&T's customers, who include the hard-core Apple lovers who have the iPhone already.

And speaking of costs, it seems that some people are beginning to think that $700 might be a wee bit pricey for this thing! To this I say: duh. But even if this outrageous price comes in as rumored, it's worth remembering how expensive iPhones were when they launched. Perhaps Apple is following the same model of extracting all the money they can from the early adopters, then dropping the cost to a more reasonable one later.