‘Double’ transforms your iPad into a $1999 telepresence robot
California-based Double Robotics has come up with a piece of kit, called Double, that turns your iPad into a telepresence robot. Cost? $1,999. — Imagine you're at your company, seated at your desk …
Context & Ripple Effects
The iPad has spent two years accumulating second lives beyond its own screen: Wired framed its 2010 arrival as a new personal-computer category with one small step for tablets, and by April 2012 a Kickstarter project was turning an iPad into a MacBook Air. Double Robotics' Double extends the same logic from computing accessories into physical presence — the tablet stops being the product and becomes the head of a machine.
The pitch lands because the installed base argument is already settled: by late 2011 the iPad accounted for 97% of tablet web traffic and out-trafficked the iPhone, so building a robot around it means inheriting Apple's ecosystem rather than shipping a display of your own. It also answers, in hardware form, the question Technologizer posed in June 2011 about what somebody should buy an iPad for instead of an iPad.
First-order effects
- Remote workers and distributed teams gain a $1,999 telepresence option built on hardware they may already own, undercutting the price floor of purpose-built videoconferencing rigs.
- Double Robotics ships a chassis business: its differentiation is the motorized base and software, while Apple supplies the screen, camera, compute, and brand pull at zero cost to Double.
Second-order effects
- Dedicated telepresence-robot makers are forced to compete against a product whose most expensive component is commoditized, pressuring their pricing toward the Double's sub-$2,000 mark.
- Apple gains unpaid reinforcement of the iPad as a platform rather than a consumption device — every Double in an office is an iPad advertisement sitting in someone else's meeting room.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, telepresence robots consolidate around a chassis-plus-tablet structure where robotics startups compete on locomotion and software while consumer tablets serve as the interchangeable face — mirroring how the PC industry settled around commodity components plus one differentiated layer.
The trend: Consumer tablets are becoming the default head of telepresence robotics, splitting the category between commodity screens owned by Apple and chassis-and-software layers owned by startups like Double Robotics.