With only days left until Apple unveils it's "latest creation", the web is all a twitter about the mystical Apple Tablet. I myself scour the web for news so I can stay on top of it all, but also because I'm excited by where mainstream tablet PCs aimed at consumers could take the future of personal computing.
For example, aside from this website, I also do a lot of audio, video and graphics work, and I try to image what the Apple Tablet might do to help me in those ventures as well. Let's take the audio work. Imagine taking the virtual mixer used in programs like Logic Pro, and now having that mixer portion running on your tablet while you work on the tracks on your main PC. Now, instead of using the mouse to control your levels, you could use the virtual mixer on the touch pad and change multiple levels at once with the tablet's multi-touch capabilities. Now you might be able to forgo an expensive external hardware control surface for one on your tablet.
You could apply that thinking to other programs as well. Imagine the Final Cut Studio tools not only being able to run on the tablet, but being "tablet enabled" on your main desktop machine. By this, I mean having Final Cut know when you have the tablet connected (via Bluetooth, perhaps?) and now the tablet becomes an accessory you can use to control tasks on the main editing machine.
Instead of having to buy a keyboard with all the colored keys showing you which function each one does, all of that could be dynamically placed on the touchpad's screen and now you have a whole new control surface. Sounds cool to me. You could use the processing power of the main machine to chug through the data and do the main number crunching, but the tablet could be used to enhance the whole user experience.
In the above scenarios, the tablet isn't used as a replacement for a main PC, but as an enhancement to the main PC's user experience. People keep thinking about what the tablet might replace, but not many have been thinking of how the Tablet PC might enhance things you already do everyday. For me, I don't see the tablet being able to replace my whole desktop, as I need that processing power for a lot of the work that I do, but I can see how it could change how I perform the work I do everyday.
Imagine how your PC experience could be changed if your Mac knew the tablet was nearby, and could automatically connect and enhance the user experience of any number of programs on your desktop. Or how a nice remote desktop client might let you do work that requires more robust computing resources than the tablet could provide, but from the comfort of your living room couch using multi-touch. And this all on top of everything else the tablet could do, such as an e-reader, web browsing, Facebook, Twitter, etc, and now you've got a machine that could do incredibly more than originally envisioned years ago when tablet PCs were first introduced.
Don't just think of the tablet as replacing other computing resources (which it may very well do), but also how it could enhance the things you already do everyday, be it for work or pleasure. Now your market for that tablet computer has grown drastically from just replacing a laptop or netbook to something you'd easily find necessary for all of your everyday activities. Tablets might be seen as a niche product by many right now, but soon I think we'll be introduced to a whole new world made possible by these tablet PCs.
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