The flurry of reports about Apple’s rumored 10-inch tablet iTouch/e-book reader/Media tablet over the weekend have only one thing in common: All are wild guesses based on exchanged rumors taking on a life of their own.
Notable in today’s Financial Times, for example, is the devastatingly guessy comment from Oppenheimer & Co. analyst Yair Reiner: “I think it will have a lot of the functionality of the iPod touch, but will be quite a bit bigger.” Mashable jumped on the FT’s report this morning, saying it “adds credibility” before going on to list the same set of questions everyone has been guessing about. Will it be a Kindle competitor? Will it be a phone or not? And so forth.
Pointing to one article riddled with guesswork does not add credibility to the rumors reported. Another article in the FT today, which discusses Apple’s efforts to revitalize the “album” in music sales, at least has some sources speaking on the record. The only named source in the tablet article, Mr. Reiner, quoted above, offers speculation. A source, described as a publishing executive said of the tablet: “It would be a colour, flat-panel TV to the old-fashioned, black and white TV of the Kindle.” That is a characterization without any detail from someone speaking off the record—why speak off the record if you aren’t leaking substantive information? Why let a source play authoritative expert when they are offering guesses?
Wild-eyed guesses. That’s all people are running with, because everyone dearly desires a good horse race to report. There is no horse race, there is a breeding program underway that will yield a lot of mules and a few thoroughbreds. Watching a breeding program can get very dull, sometimes gruesome. Unfortunately, most press are looking for “winners” and “losers” rather than seeing that features and traits developed in each generation of device are the only Darwinian players in this story. No one device or platform will win, because media is a deeply fragmented marketplace with broad choice for buyers.
Here’s what we can be sure of:
- Apple never races to meet Christmas season deadlines. The company manufactures enthusiastic buyers whenever it wants, making the primary claim of the rumors, that the device must launch between September and October, ring hollow.
- The market evolution underway now assumes that people are going to adopt specialized devices for different activities, such as reading, watching movies and browsing the Web. We have computers, televisions, radios, personal media players and myriad other devices that do most of these same things.
- No one, not even Amazon with the Kindle and its almost 800,000 units sold, has brought about the adoption of a new activity specifically suited to a small computer with a screen capable of displaying text. It’s still just reading and we’re being asked to buy another device to do it. Whether e-readers will catch on in the current form is still very much up in the air.
- The first substantial change in publishing as a result of these devices will be in magazines and newspapers, which will find renewed vitality when they don’t kill as many trees.
- Readers who buy books—the third of Americans who read more than one book a year—are not going to give up paper for formats that will be obsoleted or lacks substantial enhancements over paper, except for short-lived information, such as newspapers and magazines. Anybody remember interactive CD-ROMs, which did sell millions of units and went absolutely nowhere. The benefit of these devices is not eliminating books from people’s lives, yet that is how many characterize every step, as the “end of books.”
- Kindle is the ultimate newspaper and magazine reading device, since it provides the benefit of relieving readers of a lot of trash. No more piles of old magazines and newsprint; instead, your subscriptions will all be stored for reference and searching on a Kindle. However, any portable device, including a computer, can do the same thing. An Apple tablet could offer this, too. So, choosing a device becomes a matter of preferences and priorities. The Apple tablet addresses different priorities than the Kindle.
- Any device introduced as a Kindle-killer will be hyped, and any product Apple makes will probably be very pleasing to the eye, the ear, the touch and, because Steve Jobs will not ship a monochrome screen in an age of rich media, as he is no fool, Apple products will not deliver the long battery life that characterize e-reader devices.
- Steve Jobs will not introduce a device for a market of less than 100 million. An Apple tablet will have to combine functionality to appeal to many target users in addition to readers.
- All the devices on the market and in the offing will involve trade-offs between different classes of functionality. The Apple tablet, if it even exists, will aim for the video market and e-books will be an afterthought supported by third-party developers, meaning readers will only embrace it if they also feel strongly about carrying movies and television along with them.
Relax, the world will not end or dramatically change when Steve comes down from the mountain with his tablet, if he even does so this year.