iPad – One Tablet To Rule Them All

802.11n + Tablet = ???

Okay, so we’ve been pondering this for a while, as anyone that reads the site regularly can attest…with full on HD streaming being done at a data rate of 20-50mbit/sec, what do you need 802.11n (and its 200-500mbit/sec rate) for?? And really, how often are you going to be streaming Blu-ray and HD-DVD content around the house (as if the MPAA/studios would ever allow us to do such things!)?? And lastly, just how many multi-gigabyte files do you move around on a daily basis? If you’re like us, not very many.

So, what to do with all that bandwidth? And if we’ve got a fancy Mac Pad on the horizon, to go with our 802.11n, how would that fit together? First, let’s rename the Mac Pad the iPad, just for the time being (go with us, this is exciting stuff)…hmm…maybe we could just stream something else to the iPad…turning it into an “all in one” computing device, like the iPod is an “all in one” media device…Imagine this future with us…

iPad ships at the end of this year or early part of next year for an insane price, say $499. But what comes with it is the “lite” Mac OS X that we’re already seeing on the iPhone…it has similar sorts of features, maybe just 1-2GB of flash memory for the OS and a few local apps, settings, etc…and minus the cellular functions of the iPhone too (maybe substituting some VOIP instead). Here is where it gets exciting…what are we going to stream to this thing, then? How about the ENTIRE interface from any Mac or PC on the network?? The iPad turns any computer on your network into a wireless touchscreen-enabled tablet!! How would one do this? We’ll tell you, after the jump!