When I was in 2nd grade we got our first computer at home, an Apple ][+. One of the first softwares my dad bought to go with it was a game called "The Prisoner", loosely based on the Patrick McGoohan TV show of the same name. This was a very early game, a strange mish-mash of hi-res, lo-res, and text graphics.
One of the more distinctive traits of the game was that whenever someone "talked" to you - talking consisted of capital letters crawling across a window of lo-res block graphics - each letter was accompanied by ringing the computer's "bell" at varying pitches. I think they were going for some effect like the school teacher in Peanuts but the Apple's bell was better at making higher pitched sounds so that's what they used. The effect was like - well, like nothing else I can think of. If you ever had an Apple ][ you probably know what I mean.
Anyway, just like in the TV show, everyone on the Island ended their conversations with a cheery "Be seeing you!" (It was irony, see, because they were all prisoners on the Island - you're not going anywhere far.) Every conversation ended with "Be seeing you" and the pattern of the bells was always the same.
Every once in a while when I'm talking to someone in IM one of us will say "Be seeing you" and oddly enough the pacing of your average touch typist exactly matches the printing speed of that old Prisoner game. As soon as I start to see those letters I always always hear the bells in my head. I'm sure I'll hear them until the day I die.
Weird.
Well, we didn't get an iTablet, we got Macbook Mini. Except it's more like a "Macbook Thin." Which is interesting because making it Thin instead of Mini addresses Bill Manning's complaints about UMPCs, which I thought were spot-on.
I wasn't predicting a tablet, just hoping for one. The Macbook Thin is a great product for the "not me" demographic. There's a lot of neat tech packed into the thing but I don't have a need or a desire for one. I will stand by one thing I said, which is that there's a lot of overlap in the components that go into the Thin and the components that would go into an iTablet. Imagine breaking off the screen half of the Thin, replacing the keyboard with a 13 inch touchscreen, and you'd have a pretty kickass tablet. The internals of the two products would be pretty similar.
Right before Macworld there was a rumor that a tablet is in development, but wasn't going to be ready by January. (This rumor persists, and is gathering strength.) What if the Macbook Thin was actually a "Plan B" product, when it became clear that the tablet wasn't ready, conceived both to make some money, and also get some of this superthin tech out into the field and shake out the bugs?
One thing that is scary about the Thin, relative to my tablet obsession, is the price. If the high-end Thin is $3000, how much might the tablet cost? $4000? $5000? That's too much to pay for a device which is by design an ancillary device to another computer you already own. Maybe that in itself was the reason for delaying the tablet - getting the Thin into production will also allow them to ramp up production of components, streamline the production lines, and bring down costs, so that the eventual tablet will hit a reasonable price point.
