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Apple tablet out for XMAS ‘09 with $700 price tag? Too pricey for e-bookdom?
July 22, 2009 | 6:28 am
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By David Rothman
The rumored Apple tablet with the 8-10 inch screen will probably cost closer to $700 than the hoped for $400-$500, if the most common speculation is on target. That’s far, far too much for most people mainly interested in the tab for e-books. But perhaps e-books can piggyback on the other apps. Talk is of a release in time for Christmas.
So what would I do in Amazon’s place? I’d take the preemptive step of putting out a reasonably priced color tablet using LCD technology, perhaps the Pixel Qi variety. Decent color E Ink is several years off at the least. Meanwhile more than a few students and others will demand color. The forthcoming CrunchPad looks interesting, but remember it’s Web- rather than book-optimized.
Caveat: Apple loves to put out disinformation, such as when Steve Jobs assured us the company was not interested in e-books.
Technorati Tags: Apple tablet
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Comments:
Sure, $700 is a lot for a stand-alone e-reader, but the iPad is far more than that. And the price is definitely at the high end for a tablet computer, but that’s Apple. As an iPod owner, I’ve been looking forward to the iPad — the bigger screen, with color, is a winner, and should lead to an even wider selection of useful apps. The main drawback will of course be battery life; this one won’t take you on a flight to Australia without recharging, as e-ink based readers will. But 90 percent of my time with a Kindle has been in my easy chair at home, close to a 120v outlet. Bottom line: Bring it on.
i’m with jim — i can’t wait. i’ve wanted apple to do this for going on two years now. they have the technology in place right now with the iphone, all they need is a larger format and i’d be tickled. $700 (or even less, come on, apple, blow our minds) is CHEAP to me for something like this. credit card is in hand….
The Viliv tablets run $600 so a $700 price would be low considering we’re talklng Apple. $999 would be my guess for anything bigger than 7″.
Similarly, the Convertible Asus T91 runs $499 but since that has a keyboard the potential market and the economies of scale are bigger.
So, no the pricing is, if anything, optimistic.
This is Apple; the market will bear a higher price and they probably *will* charge a higher price.
Assuming the ever do get into the game…
This is not intended as an ebook reader. Let’s get that out of the way straight off the bat: Apple is not building or designing this as an ebook reader.
Next: it will be a device based on ARM chips, probably the ‘next-gen’ PA Semi chip for which Apple bought that company. The trade reps of the ARM community have been promising ‘smartbooks’ with a screen this size for $199. Thus:
- a $700 apple-price doesn’t seem too far out of line
- this should be thought of as a member of the iPod family
Repeat: this is a big-size iPod Touch. Now there are a few things that flow out of this basic idea:
- it won’t run any applications except Apple-approved ‘App Store’ applications.
- it will be primarily (?) something to surf the web and play games — think of it as a big breakthrough in iPhone games
- it will be locked down almost as completely as the Kindle
- (I hope) that Stanza and the Amazon iPhone Kindle-reading app will also run on this. But Amazon might ‘strongly prefer’ that we buy and use KindleDX for big-screen Kindle editions. (This device, if used for kindle books, would also enable color on kindle editions, putting the DX to shame. It’s also possible that any Kindle editions created through Amazon would block any colors; PDFs in color should be nice on this device.)
There were strong and persistent rumors last winter, when this device came back into the rumor-weir, that it would be paired with the ‘$99 iPhone’ as a package deal with Verizon. This might still happen, and it just might be that this device is not a ‘big iPod touch’ but rather ‘iPhone’s big brother’ and therefore, alas, we would only be able to buy one by signing up to a 2-year or so contract with Verizon (or another telco).
Look at Apple’s latest quarterly earnings. The management is moving steadily away from personal computers as we know them, to a proprietary, locked-down ecosystem with Apple and its telco partners holding a vertical monopoly.
In sum: this is not what anybody would think of if he heard the phrase, ‘Apple Tablet.’ It won’t run the ‘real’ OSX, it won’t contain an x86 chip, it won’t install Linux of any flavor except for those ported already to ARM chips (and Apple might have some weird hardware configurations that prevent even this). It would run Moblin or Android (again, unless Apple puts in protection chips to prevent that).
I’m looking forward, not to the device, but to its introduction. I’m looking forward to finding out for sure, for real, what it is and what it can do.
Then – maybe – I’ll get excited about it.