Everybody else has placed their bets on the likely design of the Apple tablet. It’s about time I joined the game.
Most of the previous players have based their predictions on a theory of Apple’s business strategy. Whom does Apple wish to gore today? How can Apple monetize FOO? What product synergies will help sell BAR?
Those would seem to be reasonable strategies, but playing the game requires … well, Jobsian depths of business savvy. Meta-strategy suggests that I choose a different path.
I think the winner of this little game will be the person who makes the best guess regarding Apple’s design process—including Steve Jobs’ sense of style—and how that process will shape the final product. Everything else is a distraction.
Assumptions & Prejudices
I’ll start with a few core assumptions regarding functionality:
- This device isn’t going to overlap the iPhone or current netbooks in any significant way. There’s simply no clear business reason for Apple to push a new product line into these spaces.
- If the tablet price/power ratio can match or exceed that of the MacBook, both the MacBook and the MacBook Air are gone forever. Not just the current models, but the entire product category…forever. (The MacBook Pro line will live on for power users, at least until Apple is sure that it has the heavy typists converted to the new regime.)
- I’m guessing the screen resolution will be 1920×1080 – in other words, native HD. I cannot think how a lower resolution would benefit the utility – and desirability – of a tablet design.
- This object, whatever it is, will fit inside a standard letter-size file folder. Jobs will demand it, Apple can do it, and so shall it be*. There are actually a number of excellent usability arguments for delivering something this size, but here’s one marketing justification: a smallish and slim tablet will allow Apple to position traditional MacBook Pros as power tools.
* I imagine an early draft of the tablet design doc having a small marginal note that goes something like this:
It has to smell thin.
In the dark.From 5 feet away.
- SJ
Now some random rule-outs:
- I’ll repeat: Despite rumors to the contrary, this device isn’t going to overlap into the iPhone arena. Apple will not build multiple mobile-band radios and a SIM slot and BlueTooth and 802.11n into a light, thin, power-frugal device just so some snowboarder can send live video from the bunny slopes while some telco sucks $90-120 a month out of his tattoo fund. If we’re exceptionally lucky, there will be a build-to-order option for WiMax, but don’t bet on that one.
- A certain amount of the speculation I’ve seen assumes that the Apple tablet will be a simple scale-up of the iPhone, with a 3:2 screen ratio and a diagonal size somewhere in the 7-8 inch range. I wonder if the people who’ve been thinking along those lines just have giant hands, or just haven’t stopped to think things through. A 3:2 screen ratio is great for a handheld device. Scaled up to a larger hand-and-a-halfer or larger, it’s just plain unwieldy.
- The initial device will not do handwriting recognition, because a) it will not come with a stylus, and b) fingers make absolutely lousy drawing instruments. On the other hand, feel free to expect an extremely robust after-market traffic in drawing-optimized stylii.
So what’s the plan?
Look, it’s as simple as this: It’s all about the phalanges, stupid!
If you take a look at Apple’s handheld and laptop products over the past couple of years, you’ll find that their physical dimensions reveal a deep understanding of the ergonomic and cognitive properties of the human hand, arm, and eye.
For example, the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and the iPod Classic all feature a width of around 62mm. That number isn’t a hardware requirement as such; Apple could order anything it likes.
It’s specifically 62mm because thin, bar-shaped objects of that particular width fit well between thumb and fingers, across a wide range of hand sizes, without the hand naturally closing over the all-important screen area. Narrower, and your hand closes loosely over the object; wider, and you’re forced to grip it in order to keep from dropping it. Either way, the user experience is degraded.
Striking the right mix of weight, size and balance in a larger tablet device is a obviously a trickier proposition, and I won’t lay claim to any special expertise in the field. Based solely on my long love affair with books of all sizes and weights, I’d guess you’d want the heavier bits within a few inches of the centers of each edge.
Why? Imagine cradling a book in one hand. You want a good weight cradled in your palm; not heavy, but solid. You don’t want the weight out toward the tips of the grasping hand.
In speculating about an Apple tablet, you have to step away from the 3-D modeling software for a while, look around the room, and simply pick up some of the objects you love to carry.
I’ll guarantee that Jobs started doing that within an hour of deciding a tablet would be feasible. Further, I’ll guarantee that Apple’s design labs have created hundreds of ‘balance’ models over the course of the tablet project, and Steve has fondled all of them.
If the product is meant to be handled, it must be designed for the hand.
We can be sure that the device will be a product of Apple’s ‘Unibody’ production process, which I’ll discuss in a moment. Therefore, light weight and solidity can be taken for granted. The second quality—the ‘hand-feel’—is more elusive, and I’ll talk about that in a later post.
I’ve said that ergonomic factors will determine the specific dimensions, but that doesn’t mean that there won’t be other ‘magic’ numbers built into the design. If you’ve seen Gary Hustwit’s film Objectified, you’ll recall Jony Ive, Apple’s chief of industrial design, speaking lovingly of Apple’s unibody production process, where a single billet of aluminum yields strong, unified parts for Apple products.
Recently, I’ve read that Apple has jacked up the efficiency of the unibody process by creating multiple parts from that aluminum billet; for example, instead of discarding the metal removed from the center of a screen bezel, they lay out other parts within the hole.
Only Apple knows for sure how deep these intertwined size relationships run, but I’d bet $50 right now that at least one current Apple product has had a Tablet-shaped hole in it for several months now.
Outright Speculation & Making Stuff Up
I spent a frustrating and happy weekend buried in sketches and spreadsheets, trying to get all these bits to fit together.
It turns out that if you want a tablet width of roughly 10 inches and a screen resolution of 1920×1080, you cannot order a larger version of the 163 pixels-per-inch (163 ppi) iPhone screen. It simply wouldn’t fit in the desired space.
On the other hand, 200 ppi happens to be just right, resulting in a 9.6×5.4-inch screen and leaving room for a narrow bezel. (It would be easy for Apple to achieve this or any similar resolution; the Google Nexus One screen offers 252.1 ppi.)
I soon found that other mixes of screen resolution, screen dimensions and dot pitches each have their own good and bad combinations. Requiring too much precision in width results in odd screen resolutions; a specific dot pitch and screen resolution yield an unlovely device size.
It was this mess of not-quite-lovely combinations that finally drove me to arbitrarily pick a width of 10 inches, a dot pitch of 200 ppi, and a resolution of 1920×1080. After that, all the major obstacles fell away – or so I thought.
Weight, Functionality, and Density
My best guess regarding Apple's forthcoming tablet
Weight was the next question that came to mind, and that presented an entirely different set of problems. I love the weighty, solid feel of my iPhone, but I wasn’t convinced that a similar density would work for a much larger device.
Too heavy and it could feel unwieldy. Too light and its owner may regard the tablet as cheap or unstable. Either way, the wrong thickness could cripple the tablet’s utility or, again, make the device hard to hold. *!*
I proceeded to calculate the density of the iPhone, the iPod Classic, and the MacBook Pro, thinking it would give me a clear spectrum of functionality to density. No such luck, of course. The most capable device, the MacBook Pro, had the lowest density at 1.1 grams/cc.
I had the width and height of the speculative design. I arbitrarily set the density of the tablet to 1.4 gm/cc. The weight fell out at around 720 grams (1.7-1.8 pounds) and the depth at 12.5mm, only slightly thicker than an iPhone. Close enough for unpaid work.
I decided I had done enough, declared victory, and proceeded to sketch out the resulting design. And that’s when things got really interesting.
Design Never Sleeps
Unfortunately for my day of rest, I stopped and asked myself what might fit in a box of this size. Five minutes digging and I found that the hard drives currently used in the MacBook Pro are only 9.5mm thick! Fantastic! With the right battery and cooling, you could stuff a hard drive into this slab!
Too bad about the optical dri… uh, wait a minute. Ten minutes more, and I find that there are DVD-R burners that are … BAM! 9.5mm again!
So, presuming Apple has the power and heat management chops to stuff a dual-core CULV CPU, along with a battery and all this rotating metal into a slab as thin as an iPhone, the Apple tablet could be a direct replacement for a MacBook. (And we all know Apple specializes in just this sort of thing.)
Too bad about the keybo…… and then I laid a hand on my 1:1-scale sketch of the tablet – and then two – and found that this design had room for a small but usable touch-screen QWERTY keyboard. Adequate for an adult male, quite usable for an adult female, and perfect for teens.
That was really all I needed to know.
Last Words
I’m sure Apple can do this for something close to the cost of a MacBook.
I’m satisfied that Apple could make a serious run at killing off all existing laptop designs with a larger, more powerful version of this, at the cost of leaving the mid-to-low laptop market as it currently stands.
I suspect that Steve Jobs would not be as stoked as he reportedly is about this project if what I’ve described were all he planned to accomplish. He’s something big up his sleeve.
I can’t wait to see him pull that rhinoceros out of his hat.
