Apple has recently announced a “Back to the Mac” event for this Wednesday. The teaser invitation shows the Apple logo slightly pivoted with a lion peeking out from behind it.

We are almost certain to see at this event:

1. The next version of iLife

2. The launch of a new MacBook Air

3. A preview of the next version of OSX

But let’s indulge in some wild speculation. The invitation shows the Apple logo pivoting, like a convertible tablet would. There’s also an interesting choice of wordplay in the invitation, reminiscent of the MacBook Air’s original launch:

The MacBook Air is also the most likely candidate for an initial laptop-tablet hybrid model. It is the lightest MacBook, and also commands a premium price. If Apple enters this market, it would make the most sense to enter at the high-end, as the iPad is already entrenched at the low end ($500-$1000). Introducing a premium (say $1800) tablet hybrid model will allow new Apps to transition to the desktop space without cannibalizing the existing iPad market.

It’s also clear that OSX is coming to the end of its (almost 10-year) lifecycle. The time is perfect for Apple to introduce the next generation OS (OSXI?). It’s clear that multi-touch is going to be a big part it, and Apple will undoubtedly want to take advantage of the thousands of Apps written for iOS that could be easily ported over.

As I have written before, adding iOS emulation on top of OSX would be technically trivial to do. The real challenge is going to be in getting the physical form factors right. A problem with existing convertible tablets like the Lenovo X201 is the awkward hinge. It’s hard to imagine something similar on a MacBook Air. But if anyone can solve that problem, it’s Apple.

iMac Touch patent – via patentlyapple.com 

Back in February I mused about the future of the iPad, and predicted that Apple will roll out a “MacTouch” line by next year. Far out crazy talk? Well, today an Apple patent has emerged with details on how this would actually work for both a desktop and a notebook.

In hindsight it’s a no-brainer for Apple. The software pieces are already there – it would be trivial to run an iOS emulator in OSX on a device with a touch-screen. Apps build for iPad would largely just work, and a new generation of apps designed for the larger screens would flourish.

It’s worth emphasizing again that the iPad is the linchpin to the success of this strategy. If Apple had gone straight from iPhone to desktop touch there would be no app market for it and no reason to buy one. The introduction of the iPad this year was critical. With the iPad, the very first MacTouch will have a library of thousands of apps already written for it, all selling for an average price of under $5. If we are to also believe the iTV rumor, it will also have a line of home-entertainment apps available as well.

I stand by my prediction that Apple will announce a touch-based desktop by next year. This would catapult Apple one more step ahead of the competition. As PC manufacturers struggle to bring tablets to the market, Apple will be launching a new massive attack on the desktop market, one that could prove unstoppable. Windows would be caught mid-cycle, and I believe that Google has made a strategic error in pursuing Chome OS instead of Android for the desktop. The problem is that Chrome OS next year will have nowhere near the number of apps as Android, let alone iOS to compete with Apple. In any case, neither of them would hold a candle to iOS+OSX on the desktop. It may sound over-the-top, but this has the potential to be a knockout blow to some *cough* PC manufacturers.

This is also going to be a shake-up for traditional desktop based vendors like Adobe. There will be a flood of touch-based paint apps, selling for under $9.99 competing with Photoshop express if not soon Photoshop itself. Desktop software vendors for OSX are going to have to rapidly switch to a lower price-point model, but those without the volume of iPad / iPhone apps to sustain them will be in big trouble.

Rarely is the arrow of history so clear pointing forward. This is one of those times.

Full disclosure: I’m currently still holding on to a bunch of AAPL stock, despite the weak stock market overall.

So it turns out the grooves were to separate the side panel into two antennas. Sounds smart, but I still think it’s detracts aesthetically. Let’s see what they look like in the hand.

The Retina Display though sounds stunning! Can’t wait to see it in person. I wonder how soon we can expect to see those on the iPad or even Macs?

Unless you have been offline from the Internet for months, you’ve doubtless seen several photos and videos of the alleged iPhone 4G design. It’s hard to dispute multiple seemingly independent sources all showing the very same design.

Something seems wrong to me though.

It’s the grooves:

Have you ever seen a groove on any Apple product? Unless Jonathan Ive was kidnapped and replaced with an evil twin clone, there’s no way this is a new design signature for the iPhone.

I’m calling bullshit on all the “leaked” photos out there. It’s either a very elaborate PR stunt by Apple, or (much more likely) there were a few pre-production test units without the final design that did leak, and mass copycat blogging blew everything out of proportion.

I bet that we’re all going to be very surprised on Monday morning.

I just ordered a replacement for yet another lost in-ear earbud for my Sony mdr-ex51 headphones. If you’ve never used one of these, they are little pieces of silicone that barely fit over a nub in the earpiece. A slight tug, when say pulling them out of your pocket, will send them flying across the floor. I’ve tried securing them with superglue, which helps a little, but doesn’t completely prevent the problem.

Sony sells a replacement set for a hefty fee at retain. Fortunately, you can now get replacements for a few dollars online. Why couldn’t they have simply made the groove deeper, or the earbud a little tighter-fitting?

Here are a few vision videos around tablet computing from Apple and Microsoft:

First, an Apple tablet concept video... from 22 years ago.

Microsoft's Office Labs Vision 2019: Touch walls, e-paper, and tablets galore. The second video is the full (5-minute) one.

Here are more Microsoft vision videos.

Since the rest of the web is still stuck in the mire of debating the success of the iPad launch, I thought I’d get ahead and issue some bold, baseless, predictions on its future.

The rollout will be successful. In 55 days, the debates about Flash and built-in cameras will have been exhausted, and everyone will be focused on the restricted availability and long lines at the Apple store. All engineered of course. There will be a new media blitz, with celebrity endorsements, ads, and buzz. Apple will have sold 4-5 million iPads by the end of 2010.

Business apps will be a sleeper hit. By rollout time, all essential iPhone apps would have been ported over to the iPad. The new crop of iPad-optimized apps that developers are cramming on over the next 2 months will take center stage. There will be a surprising number of new business applications, centered around communication and collaboration. You will be able to work with your existing PC documents with iWork or some OpenOffice port. The iPad will be better than a notebook for attending meetings (especially boring ones). By the end of the year, every collar-propping CEO will be sporting an iPad.

In 2011, Apple will launch the MacTouch line. Think of an iMac as an angled multi-touch surface. No more keyboard or mouse; A truly one-piece device. What could possibly be more elegant than that? The MacTouch OS will be based on OSX (OSXI?) and can run OSX apps, but it has a built-in iPad emulator, so it runs all native iPad software. It will also have new APIs that make it easy to port existing OSX apps (i.e. Photoshop) to the new multi-touch platform.

Thus will complete Apple’s dominance in multi-touch technology, with which they would have made some inroads into the business space.

* Disclaimer: I probably already own some Apple stock in some mutual fund, so you would be foolish to base any investment decisions just on this blog, or any other.

Like most other self-proclaimed commentators, I had pretty mixed feelings after watching the iPad launch. The good news is that Apple delivered on pretty much everything that was hyped about: A marathon 10 hour battery life, eBook reader, great built-in apps, and an aggressive $499 price tag for the base model. The problem is… Apple delivered pretty much everything that was hyped about. They failed to exceed expectations, and that’s why there’s so much fan-boy moping going on right now.

After a few days of contemplation, I’m sold. I believe the iPad is going to be a game-changer, but it’s going to take a while. The reason is, as Walt Mossberg puts it: “It’s about the software, stupid.” Right now, the iPad isn’t much more than a super-sized iPod Touch. In fact, it is much worse at being a video iPod than the iPod Touch: You can’t put it in your pocket, nor operate it with one hand. It is also much worse compared to a notebook computer at being a computer: The keyboard sucks, it’s less powerful, and you can’t run desktop-style apps on it. The only thing it is better than anything else at, of course, is being a tablet. The billion-dollar question then is, what are tablets going to be great at?

Steve Jobs pitched the iPad at excelling at browsing, email, photos, video, music, games, and eBooks over smartphones and PCs. I find this list hard to believe (RDF notwithstanding). I can’t imagine listening to music while tethered to a tablet, nor holding a tablet through a whole movie vs. just connecting it to my TV. Reading emails is probably fine on a tablet, but probably adequate on an iPhone. Writing long emails on a tablet sounds painful. eBooks are still arguably better served by the Kindle (although I haven’t jumped on that bandwagon yet, still preferring audiobooks myself). There will certainly be plenty of revolutionary games written for the iPad, but I don’t believe Nintendo or XBox has much to worry about in the short term. It’s never going to replace console or portable gaming.

Casual browsing is the one experience I can see the tablet excelling at, but the lack of Flash support prevents it from being a full replacement for a PC. The photo demo is likewise the best-in-class, but I consider that a minority feature on a $499 device.

Here’s the problem: The list represents current activities. The tablet form factor, in order to be successful, is going to ultimately excel at things people can’t yet do well on existing platforms. But it’s impossible to pitch it that way. Apple is facing a chicken-and-egg problem: They need to sell plenty of iPads so developers will build revolutionary apps for it, but it will be hard to do this until there are more revolutionary apps. I believe they made a tactical error in not having more launch-day showcase apps: The un-ported iPhone apps weren’t as impressive on the larger screen. It’s like showing DOS apps in a window during the Windows launch.

However, there was one new and exciting thing in the whole launch keynote that surprised me: The new iWorks apps. Building these was a great move, as is pricing them at $10 each. It shows everyone that the iPad can (one day) run serious productivity apps. Strangely enough, most of the blogosphere seems to have completely missed this. I believe that this is where the promised next app gold-rush will be: Multi-touch productivity apps. Established companies are going to ignore this at their own peril. Using Photoshop with a mouse is one day going to sound insane, as will any other kind of graphics-heavy wysiwyg app. Heavy text entry is probably still less-than-ideal on a tablet (although I may change my mind after actually trying it), but alternatives could bridge that gap (voice recognition perhaps?).

The other thing Apple did most brilliantly with this launch is the pricing: $499 guarantees that no competitor will gain a foothold. ASUS, MSI, and HP might as well cancel their tablets now. They cannot possibly out-do Apple in terms of features and software in the consumer space, and they cannot go low enough on price to be competitive. If they were smart, they would re-think the whole tablet proposition, e.g. focus on larger productivity tablets for businesses, where performance and a full OS is more important than portability and battery-life.

So, my take is that the initial iPad will be a modest success – there will probably be lines on first-availability-day, but not as long as that for the iPhone. Like the first iPod, the naysayers will outnumber the faithful for a year or two. Then once a couple of killer apps emerge, and Apple fixes the bugs in the next iterations, v3 will be the breakthrough people hoped V1 would be.

Apple tablet mockup by nDevilTV

After reading Joe Wilcox’s attempt to pull us back to reality regarding the (rumored) Apple tablet’s potential, I figured it was time to jump on the speculation bandwagon.

I believe the Apple table will be another game changer.

Computers have long been trying to converge on the tablet form-factor, and for good reason. Notice that the folk in Star Trek use tablets, not notebooks. Everyone loves to curl up in bed with a good book, but when was the last time you surfed the web on your notebook in bed? Notebooks are conversation killers in meetings, but pens on (paper) tablets work great.

I have both a desktop and notebook computer at home, but I find that I use my notebook far more often. It’s great to be able to blog from the kitchen, or watch Hulu from the sofa. However, daily use makes the shortcomings of a notebook pretty clear.

Notebooks were literally designed to be portable desktop computer replacements, and their form-factor has hardly changed in 20 years. This means that they are only really optimal for one thing: Single-user data entry. If you need to do intense and interactive work, such as creating a spreadsheet, away from your desk, then a notebook computer is an ideal tool. However, if you are just browsing the web, or playing a casual game, or watching a movie, then the notebook is less-than-ideal. It’s too unwieldy to carry around easily with one hand. It takes up too much room on a table if you just want to watch a movie or photos on the screen – it would be better if the keyboard folded the other way, or didn’t exist at all for that. Free e-books have been around for a long time, but the idea of reading on a notebook never really caught on.

The point is that we have been long satisficing with notebooks, stretching them to do things they were never originally designed to do. This is a ripe problem for someone to solve. And who better than Apple?

I’m in new-year-resolution mode now, and have started compiling the list of books I want to read in 2010. There are a number of sequels from my favorite authors due out in the next couple of months that I’m excited about.

First up is Unfolding the Napkin, by Dan Roam, the follow-up to The Back of the Napkin. Using simple sketches to help articulate and solve complex problems is a simple yet powerful tool. I find the techniques presented very useful and use them regularly. This new book goes into more detail on the framework from the first one.

Here’s Dan’s blog.

I’m a huge fan of Seth Godin, and have read all his books. His next one is Linchpin, due out in January. His last couple of books were pretty short (but sweet). This one appears to be longer. I’ll probably get the audio version.

Here’s Seth’s blog.

Switch is a new book from sibling authors Chip and Dan Heath, who wrote Made to Stick. It’s due out in February. They also have a regular column in Fast Company.

Here’s their blog.

If you’re looking for an engaging and interesting way to learn new things, I highly recommend these authors.