Antidaily

Apple’s Tablet: The Ultimate Red Herring

benjaminstein:

Apple is often compared to and seen as competing with Microsoft and Google, but it’s not a great comparison.  While there’s obvious overlap, these three companies are diverging in major ways.

Microsoft is going to continue to rule the corporate environment and will do quite well at it.  We use Google Apps at work and from personal experience, it has a shockingly long way to go to compete.  Google is going to continue to crush everyone in the cloud.  With their smarts and data center operations, we’re years from seeing a competitor.

But no one is even remotely close to Apple in the home.

It’s 2010.  All of our media is digital.  But managing our digital content is a huge pain in the ass.  It’s almost weird when you think about it.  Everyone wants digital media, but it’s such a convoluted confusing process with no good solution available.  And when there’s demand with no supply…

You may not realize it, but Apple has ALL the pieces of the puzzle.  They just need to put them all together.

My prediction is that Apple will announce a tablet of some sort tomorrow, probably with really innovative touch screen technology.  But that’s the small part.  The piece you’re missing is that the tablet will be connected to something much larger: a fully integrated digital media and home networking environment.

iTunes is the 800 pound gorilla for digital music, apps, movies, TV, and soon publishing.  Apple has the content distribution thing down pat, and have the best lawyers in the business to protect it. No problem there.

How do you want to watch it?  Apple sells the most beautiful display screens money can buy and patents for QuickTime.

Next, consider the AirportExpress/AppleTV/TimeCapsule/MacMini family of small headless appliances sitting your LAN.  These devices are suddenly going to get very high priority.  The Mac Mini gets HDMI output and the price plummets.  Now you can stick one in the closet and put one next to each of your TV screens.  Remember, Apple was a pioneer of ad hoc networking with Bonjour and has built quite a few media sharing products (iTunes sharing, iPhoto sharing).  Each of these little Mac Minis will easily talk to one another and share media across the entire LAN.  And what better way to manage them than with a sleek tablet with Cover Flow?

The Tablet will run standalone OS X, sure, but the surprising killer app for it will be Apple Remote Desktop.  OS X has had built in VNC (Apple Remote Desktop) built into it for years, so all your existing computers can be controlled via the tablet.  Welcome home media server that actually works!

Synchronizing all this data?  Consider iPhone syncing with music/movies/contacts/bookmarks and MobileMe for syncing all your desktops.  No problem.

They’ve got Front Row, a gorgeous software interface for controlling your home media.  And Remote, an iPhone app for controlling your iTunes running over the network.  They’ve been practicing this stuff for years.

Throw in Snow Leopard, a major OS X release who’s sole purpose was to slim down and improve performance.  Weird when viewed by itself, but when you start coupling it with many little devices that need a tight version of OS X…

Oh, and I almost forgot: since every purchase in the iTunes Store links your Apple account with your credit card, Apple has more credit cards on file than any other company on the planet.  All ready to 1-click deliver content to your home.  Don’t want to pay for content?  That’s okay too.  Guess who just bought an ad network?

Tomorrow you will see Apple’s 10 year old digital media strategy finally unfold before your eyes.  It will all be so blindingly obvious that you can’t even believe you missed it.  It will actually be the most important thing Steve Jobs has ever done.

The new version of OS X is going to be announced.  It will be the backend that finally unifies all of Apple’s seemingly disparate products and technology: gorgeous displays, content distribution, content sharing, MobileMe, ad hoc networking, remote application control, QuickTime, advertising, payment processing.

And the Tablet becomes the one ring to rule them all.