The London Times
Can Apple’s Jesus Tablet deliver a miracle?
Next week’s launch is creating more than the usual buzz. That’s because it may be the potential saviour of the written word
Antonia Senior
Some techheads are calling it the Messiah Machine; others the Jesus Tablet. On Wednesday, Apple will unveil its new gizmo, a tablet computer. The world will be watching — and not just the black polo-necked, thick-specced, champagne-tech crowd who normally weep sycophantic tears of idolatry every time Steve Jobs appears in public. Even those normal beings who think that God v Darwin is a rather more important philosophical question than Mac v PC will be watching — or should be.
This is the most eagerly awaited product launch of the millennium so far: perhaps the most anticipated technological advance in history. The wheel, the axe and the printing press may have remade human society, but all the buzz came with hindsight.
The atmosphere on the tech blogs is febrile. The agnostics are awash with rumours about names and capabilities: will it be iSlate, or iPad; will there be a keyboard dock as well as a virtual keyboard; how will Apple finesse the problem faced by e-readers that if you strip out the back-lighting, the screen is readable in daylight, but only in black and white? Meanwhile sites such as the influential techcrunch.com are issuing plaintive cries for an end to the chatter until the thing is launched.
Apple’s obsessive secrecy is grist to the extraordinary rumour mill. It’s the most brilliant no marketing, marketing campaign. In any other company, the silence and the hype would be irritating hubris. Not in this case. The Apple tablet will be transformative. Succeed or fail, on Wednesday, Apple will be making cultural history.
Failure, despite Steve Jobs’ Midas touch, is a real possibility. Tablet computers have been around for aeons. In the early 1990s, tech- visionaries speculated that we would all have migrated to tablets by the millennium. In 2001, Bill Gates predicted tablets would be the future within five years. We are still waiting.
There is little doubt that Apple’s tablet will be a thing of loveliness: sleek, thin and covetable, like a battery-powered haiku. It is likely to leave first-time users with that sense of open-mouthed awe at technology that combines cleverness with simplicity, that sense of being a South Sea islander seeing a mirror for the first time. It is Jobs’ new baby.
But why do we need a tablet? OK, it will compute, play moving pictures, display still ones. You will be able to read on it, write on it and listen to music. But already, in my two-and-a-half person household, we have two televisions, three radios, two laptops, one notebook, three iPods of differing sizes, one Kindle e-reader, one digital photo frame, subscriptions for two magazines and one newspaper and double-stacked, groaning bookshelves. We are digitised to the eyeballs and sated by media. Why do we need more? Apple is trying to create a craving for a product we don’t need. But we didn’t know we needed an MP3 player, either, until the iPod taught us differently.
There is a reason for the biblical tinge in the tablet’s nicknames. This device is seen as a potential saviour of the written word. Traditional print media — newspapers and magazines — are struggling. Readership online is thriving, but proving hard to monetise; readership of traditional, paper-based media is falling, threatening sales and advertising revenues.
Readers currently expect to get their online content free. The battle to persuade them otherwise is just beginning — The New York Times this week became the latest paper to announce that it would extend charging for content online. This newspaper intends to start charging for a digital version from the spring.
No one expects this to be an easy transition. As Chris Anderson says in his book on internet economics, Free, the gap in the consumer’s mind between 0p and 1p is infinitely greater than the gap between 1p and £1. The beauty of the tablet model is that it is likely to follow Apple’s previous ground-breaking inventions by embedding within it the notion of paying for stuff. Tunes are not free; neither are many apps.
So why do we pay? In part, because apps for the iPhone are covetable, functional and sexy. Trapped in a lift-shaft in Port-au-Prince this week, Dan Woolley used a medical app to look up treatment for his wounds. A very modern medical miracle.
The iPhone and iPod are portable, but they are also highly personal bits of kit. Apple has created a virtuous circle — it creates toys we desire, and then uses our desire to personalise our toys to sell us more stuff. The more we love, the more we pay.
The written-word industry wants in on the Apple/consumer love-in. The publishing industry, spooked by e-readers, wants to break Amazon’s effective monopoly on the fledgeling industry. Everyone wants us to want a tablet, even Microsoft, which can flog its own cheaper version once Apple has created the desire. The spoke in this wheel of love is, of course, money. Apple has been in talks with the titans of the written word, including The New York Times, Condé Nast Publications and News Corporation, The Times’ parent company. They are trying to get in early to avoid Apple becoming too powerful a middleman between writer and reader. They already deal with a middleman on the internet, Google, and it has not been a comfortable experience.
On Wednesday, when the tech-heads are salivating over Apple’s tablet, there will be some gimlet-eyed types following the money trail. Apple may fail to make a market; Jobs may be more Job than God in this instance. But this in itself would be of huge significance. E-readers have so far failed to take off; books, newspapers and magazines are portable and cheap technology, and therefore hard to supplant. The problem is, people just aren’t buying. If Apple can’t shift us towards digital words, and a whole new source of cash, it is likely that no one can.
Like most people, I’m broadly in favour of being paid. And if you won’t pay for me online, maybe you’ll pay to tout me around in your handbag?
Can Apple’s Jesus Tablet deliver a miracle?
Next week’s launch is creating more than the usual buzz. That’s because it may be the potential saviour of the written word
Antonia Senior
Some techheads are calling it the Messiah Machine; others the Jesus Tablet. On Wednesday, Apple will unveil its new gizmo, a tablet computer. The world will be watching — and not just the black polo-necked, thick-specced, champagne-tech crowd who normally weep sycophantic tears of idolatry every time Steve Jobs appears in public. Even those normal beings who think that God v Darwin is a rather more important philosophical question than Mac v PC will be watching — or should be.
This is the most eagerly awaited product launch of the millennium so far: perhaps the most anticipated technological advance in history. The wheel, the axe and the printing press may have remade human society, but all the buzz came with hindsight.
The atmosphere on the tech blogs is febrile. The agnostics are awash with rumours about names and capabilities: will it be iSlate, or iPad; will there be a keyboard dock as well as a virtual keyboard; how will Apple finesse the problem faced by e-readers that if you strip out the back-lighting, the screen is readable in daylight, but only in black and white? Meanwhile sites such as the influential techcrunch.com are issuing plaintive cries for an end to the chatter until the thing is launched.
Apple’s obsessive secrecy is grist to the extraordinary rumour mill. It’s the most brilliant no marketing, marketing campaign. In any other company, the silence and the hype would be irritating hubris. Not in this case. The Apple tablet will be transformative. Succeed or fail, on Wednesday, Apple will be making cultural history.
Failure, despite Steve Jobs’ Midas touch, is a real possibility. Tablet computers have been around for aeons. In the early 1990s, tech- visionaries speculated that we would all have migrated to tablets by the millennium. In 2001, Bill Gates predicted tablets would be the future within five years. We are still waiting.
There is little doubt that Apple’s tablet will be a thing of loveliness: sleek, thin and covetable, like a battery-powered haiku. It is likely to leave first-time users with that sense of open-mouthed awe at technology that combines cleverness with simplicity, that sense of being a South Sea islander seeing a mirror for the first time. It is Jobs’ new baby.
But why do we need a tablet? OK, it will compute, play moving pictures, display still ones. You will be able to read on it, write on it and listen to music. But already, in my two-and-a-half person household, we have two televisions, three radios, two laptops, one notebook, three iPods of differing sizes, one Kindle e-reader, one digital photo frame, subscriptions for two magazines and one newspaper and double-stacked, groaning bookshelves. We are digitised to the eyeballs and sated by media. Why do we need more? Apple is trying to create a craving for a product we don’t need. But we didn’t know we needed an MP3 player, either, until the iPod taught us differently.
There is a reason for the biblical tinge in the tablet’s nicknames. This device is seen as a potential saviour of the written word. Traditional print media — newspapers and magazines — are struggling. Readership online is thriving, but proving hard to monetise; readership of traditional, paper-based media is falling, threatening sales and advertising revenues.
Readers currently expect to get their online content free. The battle to persuade them otherwise is just beginning — The New York Times this week became the latest paper to announce that it would extend charging for content online. This newspaper intends to start charging for a digital version from the spring.
No one expects this to be an easy transition. As Chris Anderson says in his book on internet economics, Free, the gap in the consumer’s mind between 0p and 1p is infinitely greater than the gap between 1p and £1. The beauty of the tablet model is that it is likely to follow Apple’s previous ground-breaking inventions by embedding within it the notion of paying for stuff. Tunes are not free; neither are many apps.
So why do we pay? In part, because apps for the iPhone are covetable, functional and sexy. Trapped in a lift-shaft in Port-au-Prince this week, Dan Woolley used a medical app to look up treatment for his wounds. A very modern medical miracle.
The iPhone and iPod are portable, but they are also highly personal bits of kit. Apple has created a virtuous circle — it creates toys we desire, and then uses our desire to personalise our toys to sell us more stuff. The more we love, the more we pay.
The written-word industry wants in on the Apple/consumer love-in. The publishing industry, spooked by e-readers, wants to break Amazon’s effective monopoly on the fledgeling industry. Everyone wants us to want a tablet, even Microsoft, which can flog its own cheaper version once Apple has created the desire. The spoke in this wheel of love is, of course, money. Apple has been in talks with the titans of the written word, including The New York Times, Condé Nast Publications and News Corporation, The Times’ parent company. They are trying to get in early to avoid Apple becoming too powerful a middleman between writer and reader. They already deal with a middleman on the internet, Google, and it has not been a comfortable experience.
On Wednesday, when the tech-heads are salivating over Apple’s tablet, there will be some gimlet-eyed types following the money trail. Apple may fail to make a market; Jobs may be more Job than God in this instance. But this in itself would be of huge significance. E-readers have so far failed to take off; books, newspapers and magazines are portable and cheap technology, and therefore hard to supplant. The problem is, people just aren’t buying. If Apple can’t shift us towards digital words, and a whole new source of cash, it is likely that no one can.
Like most people, I’m broadly in favour of being paid. And if you won’t pay for me online, maybe you’ll pay to tout me around in your handbag?
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