Apple Tablet By Holidays, With “Revolutionary” New Kind of Digital Album
5:54 am, July 27th, 2009, Leander Kahney
Apple is designing an entirely new entertainment experience designed specifically for its upcoming tablet, the Financial Times claims today in an interesting but rather vague story.
Apple’s fabled touchscreen tablet will have a 10-inch screen and will be more like an oversized iPod Touch than a full-fledged tablet computer (a key question is what OS it will run).
Contrary to previous rumors, the tablet hit stores in time for the holidays, the FT says, citing record label sources out of New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
To accompany it, Apple is working on a new entertainment package to rival the album experience in days of yore, when the release of a new album was a cultural and social event.
“It’s all about re-creating the heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork, while you listened to the music,” one executive told the FT.
Codenamed “Cocktail,” the entertainment bundle would resemble an “interactive book,” but be more than a bunch of hotlinked PDFs, the FT says.
Apple is reportedly working on Cocktail with the big four record labels, who describe the project as “revolutionary” and are hoping it will offset declining album sales. When consumers buy music online, they biuy low-margin singles, not profitable albums.
Unfortunately the FT doesn’t have many details of this intriguing idea. Reminds me of the hype surrounding “multi-media CDs” in the late ’90s when CDs with music and video were supposed to provide a similar revolution in entertainment and education. There was talk about amazing immersive encyclopedias, but instead we got unreadable digital books with tiny embedded QuickTime movies.
Its also hard to imagine friends sitting around an Apple tablet reading band biographies while listening to music.
Much easier to imagine a couple of kids on the couch sharing the device to watch episodes of Spongebob.
Indeed, one record exec told the FT: “It’s going to be fabulous for watching movies.”
The FT says Apple is also in talks with book publishers who are “optimistic about their services being offered with the new computer.”
Posted by Leander Kahney in Apple, Hardware, News, iTunes | Comment on this article
remember the 250 “designs” for the Apple phone? There were websites that colated them.
NONE of them predicted no keypad etc.
Not one, not even close.
Why does anyone think the next revolutionary thing from Apple would be …. anything WE could think of??????
ged, on July 27th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
It is important that before you publish your article, which is well written by the way, you have someone do a quick read for spelling mistakes. Ending your article with, “The FT says Apple is aslo in talks…,” leaves a negative lasting impression about your abilities as a writer.
Punky Helper, on July 28th, 2009 at 7:42 am
[...] I didn’t say I am not sure if I really want an Apple tablet. Of course I want one. But having an iPhone and a Mac Book Pro already in my laptop bag, what value [...]
Apple Tablet: Will you buy one? | Not Will Smith, on August 13th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
Imagine if the tablet could run apps from the iTunes store like how widgets work on the dashboard? That would be pretty cool.
Still, a tablet to me is a laptop without the keyboard and trackpad, which is sort of useless. Apple will have to invent some believable ‘problems’ that it’s tablet would ’solve’ to make it sell.
Fill, on August 27th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
What I want from the iTablet is ability to read all my ebooks, watch videos, a game or three, and maybe some light web work like accessing email. I don’t care about much else. It’s an entertainment thing while on long plane flights, waits in airports, or car and bus trips. is that asking too much?
James Smith, João Pessoa, Brazil, on October 12th, 2009 at 9:16 am