John Gruber: No Camera on Apple Tablet
In a brief comment regarding the Apple tablet, Daring Fireball's John Gruber, notes that his sources have indicated that the device will not include a camera. — And, for what it's worth, I'm hearing there is no camera, webcam or otherwise, on The Tablet.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two years into the tablet watch — from the Macworld spyshots that showed a device Apple then declined to ship, through last August's insider account of the project's direction, to BetaNews arguing just last week in its case against the whole category that nobody needs one — the pre-announcement picture is still assembled entirely from sourced fragments.
John Gruber adds one more fragment: per his sources, the tablet carries no camera or webcam of any kind. It is an unconfirmed rumor, but it comes from a commentator whose read on Apple internals is treated by the Apple-watching press as close to authoritative, which means it will function as the working spec until Apple itself says otherwise.
First-order effects
- If the sourcing holds, Apple's tablet arrives positioned purely as a consumption device — reading, media, and the iPhone app catalog that passed three billion downloads earlier this month — rather than as a video-calling or content-creation tool.
Second-order effects
- Competing tablet efforts can make the camera a visible differentiator against Apple before launch day, since Apple has confirmed nothing either way.
- A correct call here compounds Daring Fireball's standing as the de facto pre-announcement channel for Apple hardware, concentrating expectation-setting in a single commentator's feed.
Third-order effects
- The pattern running since at least 2008 is that Apple products are now specified in public by sourced rumor months before the company speaks, so each launch becomes a reconciliation between the leaked baseline and the shipped reality rather than a clean reveal.
The trend: Apple hardware launches are increasingly pre-written by sourced leaks, with trusted commentators like Gruber establishing the spec consensus that official announcements merely confirm or correct.