Update: Wow, I’m really kicking myself right now!
The following is a rough post that I wrote on January 7th, but held of posting for a little spit and polish. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to clean it up last night (I was planning to do it somewhat Chandan-style and actually provide a little description of the technology behind it, including comparisons between iChat & Starfire). Well, with Steve Jobs’ announcement of the iPhone — which, honestly, I was extremely skeptical about — you can really see why I should really have just made it live. Doh!

For the past week, every time a coworker has asked what I’m hoping for most at MacWorld, they always look down at my hand with the Newton MessagePad 2100 in it and just chuckle and say, “Oh, a Mac tablet!” Well, duh! Er, I mean, naturally.

However, when OWC’s ModBook was brought up on NewtonTalk I couldn’t help but think, “Flop.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still requesting that my coworkers take some pictures of it while they’re at MacWorld next week, but I have to agree completely with Steven Frank — Well, almost completely, I might be the only person in the world that wants a Mac tablet more than him — that there really just isn’t a big enough Market for one and surely running Mac OS X with some tweaks to make it function better for pen input is not the right solution. Especially when it’s not even Apple implementing it. Nothing against OWC and Axiotron — in fact, I wish them the best in this endeavor and a hope it’s a great product — but this seems like a fairly risky business venture for them to try to undertake, esp. considering the cost of repackaging MacBooks (they’re not exactly cheap, even for bulk orders) and the consumer is left to hope that: 1) OWC/Axiotron can make additions to Mac OS X to allow better control using only a Wacom tablet, and 2) that they can keep up with Apple’s changes.

There’s a reason I still use my Newton every day and have not switched to a Palm or just carrying my MacBook Pro around with me everywhere: the Newton OS. There’s a reason that Paul Guyot has put so much work into bringing it to other hardware platforms with his Einstein Newton emulator: the Newton OS. Starting to see a pattern here? A PDA/tablet computer just isn’t useful if you try to “strip-down” a desktop computer OS in an attempt to shoehorn it into such a device. Apple’s Newton team and Palm’s teams did excellent work designing the OS to go along with their devices and work for the type of usage such a device gets.

As much as I love Mac OS X, I do have to completely agree with Steven Frank on this one:

Here is a handy trick you can apply to any rumor to determine its validity: Does the rumor contain the phrase “stripped-down version of Mac OS X”? If so, the rumor is almost certainly false.

Even Mac OS X would not easily be “stripped-down” to work on an embedded device or a PDA/tablet. The User Interface has been heavily optimized for desktop use. Sure, one could easily get a slimmed down version of Darwin running on the hardware, but that says nothing about the windowing & UI layers that Apple has built-up ontop of it.

I don’t think that a real tablet computer will have a large enough potential user base to be a profitable product until multi-touch displays are available in a tablet-size device so that on-screen keyboards are a viable option when large amounts of text input are required.

I’d guess that a Mac (or other) tablet would really have to be a device not too much thicker than the base of a MacBook or MacBook Pro (not including the display), a multi-touch sensitive display (which, incidentally, must also have a very wide vertical viewing angle), and a modernized OS similar to the Newton OS. This is a significant amount of development for a product category that would likely have a much smaller user base than even a single laptop model.