Cupertino Kremlinology

In preparation to try my hand at Apple prognostication, the standard disclaimers apply: I have no inside information, I am engaging in idle speculation, and I am fully prepared to eat my words. Okay. Let’s get started.

I’m not interested in what unreleased hardware will look like, since it’s safe to say anything designed by Apple will be simple and breathtakingly beautiful (as usual), and will solve the associated design challenges with kick-you-in-the-pants obviousness.* The interesting question I keep coming back to is whether a tablet device will run the iPhone OS, and by extension, run iPhone apps.

First of all, since the rumored tablet would presumably have more in common with an iPhone than your mom’s MacBook—multitouch screen, accelerometer—it’s safe to say it would not be running Mac OS X. Apple has already created a mobile version of OS X—the iPhone OS. Furthermore, it’s clear that Apple has designed Cocoa Touch from the beginning to have enough headroom to grow into a device with a larger screen. (Which might explain why the SDK took so long.) Evidence of this includes the UIWindow class, which exists even though iPhone applications display only one window. I bet Cocoa Touch on the tablet will allow multi-windowed applications.

I would also wager that the device would be able to run existing iPhone apps without any trouble. I’m almost positive, however, that they won’t run full screen. App developers have spent too much time optimizing their UIs so widgets are relatively finger-sized. The interfaces simply won’t scale without usability problems.

Given that size is less of a constraint in a tablet device, I expect the hardware to be powerful enough to support multitasking. This, combined with the presumption that the tablet would run iPhone apps at their native size presents an interesting UI possibility. I envision a dashboard-like layer where a limited number iPhone apps run as widgets on the tablet.

Picture this: iPhone apps launch on a translucent layer where a pair of widgets run side-by-side on the screen. A simple swipe will switch between pages of running apps that don’t fit on the first screen—just like having multiple pages open in Mobile Safari. Capping the number of simultaneously running apps is as simple as limiting the number of pages in the widget layer.

Apple would be crazy to launch a device without the momentum of the App Store behind it, and the only way hit the ground running would be to let existing iPhone apps run on a tablet. In the end though, Apple has spent far more time thinking about these problems and refining the solutions than all of the armchair product-designers and rumormongers combined. I may be wildly off predicting the app switcher, but it’s a fairly safe bet that whatever we see next Wednesday will blow us away.

* I won’t speculate on text input other than saying that I don’t expect to see Inkwell, Mac OS X’s pen input software, anywhere near this thing. Considering there’s no page dedicated to Inkwell on Apple’s website, it’s easy to guess how Jobs feels about this technology.