Rumoured Apple Tablet

[tromo]

Should be able to work up a neat touchscreen midi interface in Max and probably wirelessly network to a laptop running Live for complete stomping on the lemur. chances are, apple will roll something like this out for $500-700 or so (based on current pricing of the iphone) so it'll probably be a complete bargain compared to the lemur.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it comes out soon so they can work the bugs out before i'm ready to buy.

[porfiry]

I don't find the laptop format particularly inconvenient, so I'm not too incredibly excited about tablets...the touchscreen could be really cool for use as a controller, but however many thousands those things might cost is an awful lot to pay for a touchscreen midi controller. As for the validity of the rumor, the Ars Technica article I read today says Gizmodo is reporting on these things from a "100% reliable" source. Whatever!

The thing I'm personally more excited about is the giant iPod Touch that is almost certain to come out in October. TouchOSC is going to rock on that thing. I read an article many months ago stating that apple had purchased a metric shit-ton of 9 or 10" flatscreens...no mystery about what those are going in. It's not like they're going to come out with some piece-of-shit Eee or Dell Mini 9 clone. At any rate, that's a lot more manageable size for my taste.

I mean, you're using this thing that's basically a one-piece laptop as your touch controller...so what are you running Live on? Another laptop? Running it in the background behind the touch control software? Sounds like either kind of a mess, or really expensive.

One other note about 1st-gen reliability: my 2004 17" G5 iMac was nothing but trouble. It's gone through two power supplies, two optical drives, and probably some other shit I can't remember. It's still my wife's computer, despite still having weird problems with sleep, the fan, constantly losing permissions and system prefs stuff, etc. My parents bought a 20-incher at the same time and had a rash of other issues with it, mostly logic board/graphics stuff. It's still running relatively stable too, although they're nothing close to power users. That particular computer seemed to be the point where Apple officially started beta testing their equipment on customers...the flood of complaints about those machines online was rather staggering.

On the other hand, I bought a 1st-gen mac mini several years ago, and found it to be the most stable mac of the 6 or 7 I've had in the past 12 years. Also by far the most lackluster of the bunch performance-wise from the day it was purchased, hence the stability, probably.

[sunaivod]

It looks cool, and attractive, but to me it's like a monitor wich can't stand up straight.. ? In the end it will have gadgets like,... a keyboard.. a mouse ? A cool holder for the tablet? In the end it will be that same computer u had, BUT, ladies and gentleman, you can touch it. And you will get RSI in your shoulder

I'm very curious what it's really gonna be.. but to me it's just a laptop without the keyboard haha.
Am I the only one?

[Machinesworking]

It looks cool, and attractive, but to me it's like a monitor wich can't stand up straight.. ? In the end it will have gadgets like,... a keyboard.. a mouse ? A cool holder for the tablet? In the end it will be that same computer u had, BUT, ladies and gentleman, you can touch it. And you will get RSI in your shoulder

I'm very curious what it's really gonna be.. but to me it's just a laptop without the keyboard haha.
Am I the only one?

If it has multitouch and Live supports it, you really won't have much use at all for a mouse or keyboard. Think about it, you can fire clips by simply tapping the clip arrow, you can change parameters on a soft synth on screen without mousing a round dial around etc. Basically it would make soft synths in league with VA hardware, and render most controllers except a guitar and keyboard redundant.

Why bother with a Lemur, Mackie Control, Kore, APC40, Monome, or any other knob/fader combination if you can do all that just as easily on screen?

[ze2be]

It looks cool, and attractive, but to me it's like a monitor wich can't stand up straight.. ? In the end it will have gadgets like,... a keyboard.. a mouse ? A cool holder for the tablet? In the end it will be that same computer u had, BUT, ladies and gentleman, you can touch it. And you will get RSI in your shoulder

I'm very curious what it's really gonna be.. but to me it's just a laptop without the keyboard haha.
Am I the only one?

If it has multitouch and Live supports it, you really won't have much use at all for a mouse or keyboard. Think about it, you can fire clips by simply tapping the clip arrow, you can change parameters on a soft synth on screen without mousing a round dial around etc. Basically it would make soft synths in league with VA hardware, and render most controllers except a guitar and keyboard redundant.

Why bother with a Lemur, Mackie Control, Kore, APC40, Monome, or any other knob/fader combination if you can do all that just as easily on screen?

exactly.. Im now hoping for a device that could replace the function and size of the qwerty keyboard on my studio desktop, to be kind of the next evolution step in human computer interface control. If it is multi touch that is. Remember that Russian qwerty keyboard with small led screens in each key? That thing was a lot of peoples wet dream. Well, this thing would smoke it. It would be a lemur, keyboard, touch pad, whatever.. It would change graphics after what program you where using.. Illustrator? Photoshop? Live? If you need HW faders and pots, just place a nano control under it..

[oblique strategies]

It looks cool, and attractive, but to me it's like a monitor wich can't stand up straight.. ? In the end it will have gadgets like,... a keyboard.. a mouse ? A cool holder for the tablet? In the end it will be that same computer u had, BUT, ladies and gentleman, you can touch it. And you will get RSI in your shoulder

I'm very curious what it's really gonna be.. but to me it's just a laptop without the keyboard haha.
Am I the only one?

No, my first response was similar. I question the ergonomics of the device, not the potential usefulness of it, even without multi-touch.

Naturally an Apple tablet would be fun, & has the potential to be very useful. But, as has been pointed out, it will in all likelihood be aimed squarely at the consumer market, & will be lacking in some way (Apple has gotten rather good at this lately).

I don't relish the idea of giving up valuable screen real estate for a virtual keyboard though whenever it is invoked...

[Veqtor]

With Win7 having native multi-touch support I can't imagine Snow Leopard not having some hidden drivers already built in, with apple products in the pipeline to compete with microsofts multi-touch products.

[3dot...]

there's multitouch API in both Win7 and Mac OS...
the problem is there isn't much (or any...) actual HW to utilise it..
or that said hardware is very expensive to be a consumer product...
and therefore not worth developing for...