Hybrid tablets incorporating touch screens and keyboards, and based on Intel’s new Haswell processor, may threaten the iPad, according to an analyst.
Citibank analyst Glen Yeung predicts that we will see “limited innovation” in tablets, while there will be “growing innovation in PCs”, reports cNet.
Yeung predicts a “growing presence of touch-based, ultrathin, all-day notebooks at improving price points” will “create competition for 10” tablets not fully anticipated by the market. “
Yeung claims that Apple will release an iPad mini Retina and a new thinner, lighter iPad 5,” but says: “That won’t be enough to “reverse share loss”.
Crucial to this PC onslaught is Intel’s upcoming Haswell processor and that company’s requirement that Haswell-based ultrabooks should have touch screens.
This is contradictory to Apple’s late CEO Steve Jobs claim that putting a touch screen on a Mac would be “ergonomically terrible”.
Speaking at a press conference in October 2010, late Apple CEO Steve Jobs said: “Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical.”
Jobs dismissed touch on desktops, saying: “It gives great demo but after a short period of time, you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. It doesn’t work …. It’s ergonomically terrible.”
The more perpendicular the screen, the more you have to bend your wrist to type, a posture that anatomists call “dorsiflexion.” That puts more pressure on the median nerve and the other structures in the carpal tunnel in the wrist.
Jobs wasn’t the only one to dismiss the tablet/laptop combo. Last year Apple CEO Tim Cook coined the phrase “toaster-fridge” when he compared Microsoft’s plans for Windows 8, which runs on personal computers, laptops, netbooks, and tablet PCs, with the idea of combining a toaster and a refrigerator.
Cook said: “Anything can be forced to converge. But the problem is that the products are about tradeoffs. You begin to make tradeoffs to the point where what you have left at the end of the day doesn’t please anyone. You can converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but you know, those things are probably not going to be pleasing to the user.”
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Author: Karen Haslam, Editor
Macworld editor since 2008, Karen has worked on both sides of the Apple divide, clocking up a number of years at Apple's PR agency prior to joining Macworld two decades ago.
Karen's career highlights include interviewing Apple's Steve Wozniak and discussing Steve Jobs’ legacy on the BBC. Her focus is Mac, but she lives and breathes Apple.