The Original Tablet
I enjoyed Paul Thurrott's daily coverage of CES last week. A big trade show is a hard thing to capture in prose, and Thurrott got it. — But I chuckled at this piece starting his CES coverage, “Exclusive! Microsoft to Announce Tablet PC Before Apple!”:
Context & Ripple Effects
The tablet story has been building for years in this corpus: Windows Tablet PCs were already being called workable back in February 2006, Asus said in November 2007 that an Apple tablet was real, and by September 2009 the framing had hardened into an outright tablet war. Against that backdrop, Gruber's post is a jab at the latest beat: Paul Thurrott's CES coverage teasing that Microsoft would announce its Tablet PC before Apple did.
The point of the jab is timing as narrative. Microsoft's rumored pre-announcement would let it claim the category first, while Apple's iSlate remains widely reported as real but undesigned-in-public — meaning the actual product reveal, not the press release, is what both camps are positioning around.
First-order effects
- Microsoft wins the January 2010 news cycle at CES with a rumored tablet announcement timed ahead of Apple, forcing every subsequent iSlate report to be measured against it.
- Apple stays silent on the iSlate, keeping its design unknown and letting rivals define expectations it can later exceed or ignore.
Second-order effects
- CES becomes the staging ground for pre-emptive claims: hardware makers and Microsoft compete for the 'first' label precisely because Apple's unannounced device has made tablets the season's contested category.
- Tech commentary splits into two camps — those treating Microsoft's stylus-era Tablet PC lineage as prior art and those arguing only Apple can make the category mainstream — shaping which products reviewers treat as serious contenders.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, category ownership in personal computing will be decided by design-led reveals and narrative control rather than by who shipped a working device first — a lesson Microsoft's own Tablet PC history, functional since at least 2006 without ever owning the market, already illustrates.
The trend: Tablet computing is shifting from Microsoft's decade-old stylus-driven Tablet PC concept toward a consumer-category contest whose winner will be set by design and launch narrative, with Apple's rumored iSlate as the pivot.