Who knows what the iTablet will look like. But change things it will.
Apple has gotten pretty good at the revolution business. When they enter a category, it is assumed that there will be a world-changing result. It’s fun, it’s exciting, it gets tons of free PR (which preloads the cannon for the next product). Coming soon: iTablet.
Apple does what they do so well, they get credited with inventing a new category — even though, technically speaking, they’re taking over an existing one. They’re revolutionizing someone else’s revolution. You might even argue that, other than the original Apple I computer, Apple has yet to create a single revolution from scratch. They simply identify an existing category and create something better. Vastly, exceedingly, wonderfully better.
The Mac debuted in a world of PCs. MP3 players were the hot device before the first iPod was unveiled. Smartphones were a huge market before iPhone appeared. Now iTablet will revolutionize a category populated by Kindle and its imitators, and all those netbooks. Following the Apple playbook, they will take this idea and turn it into something so fundamentally game-changing that all these other guys will be left scratching their heads and wondering why they didn’t think of that.
Kindle is cool, but shallow. It’s a convenient way to consume print’s black-and-white past. It’s a hint of revolution — but it’s a revolution about to be hijacked.
Just as iPod changed music and iPhone changed communications, iTablet will change the way we consume media. We’ll all say “of course” when we see a simple and elegant way to enjoy newspapers, magazines, books, music, movies and all of the Internet in one painfully cool device. We’ll marvel at the new vision of “the daily paper,” combining print with video and gorgeous graphics that bring stories to life (never mind that it’s all out there on the web already). And we’ll wonder how civilized people could ever have allowed all those trees to be slaughtered, only to be mashed into mega-tons of newsprint that get tossed at the end of the day.
The scope of this revolution requires Apple to recruit partners. Big ones. They’re lining up the major media companies, who will announce new forms of content designed to meet the new iTablet standard, just as they seduced the record companies and movie studios before. Newspapers and magazines, now a dying breed, will re-emerge with new vitality as an integral part of our mobile lives.
It’s not that others couldn’t see this coming. It’s that they didn’t have the will, the ingenuity and the leadership to make it happen. This is a revolution that needed a good hijacking.
