“A little birdy tells me that Apple will announce a 12 or 13-inch tablet in the fall of this year. Most likely in the September or October time frame. It will run the full Mac OS X and have a slot loading SuperDrive, an ‘iPhone-type’ GPS chip and an Intel Core Duo processor, presumably Intel’s Atom,” Jason D. O’Grady blogs for ZDNet.
“Whether it’ll be a based on the iPhone or MacBook form-factor remains to be seen. You’ll recall that Intel Germany CEO Hannes Schwaderer spilled the beans that an ‘iPhone’ that will be using Intel’s new Atom processor after which he was quickly corrected by Apple,” O’Grady writes. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire indeed.”
“This particular birdy has been reliable in the past so I’m optimistic about the rumor, but as always, nothing’s for sure,” O’Grady writes. “Apple’s had tablet Macs in the labs for years but hasn’t decided to make one a real product, until now.”
More in the full article here.
shen: “Deliver by Thursday?”
O.K., it will be A Thursday.
This thing exists–it’s just a matter of whether they’ll release it. Steve joked at one of WWDC events about a 10″ iPod with touch screen. The audience laughed. He chuckled. I never thought he was kidding. It’s just a little hard to imagine the utility of such a thing, unless there’s a new application it might be useful for.
The person, aptly signed as “Bollocks” said something to the effect of:
“Most people saw no purpose for a self-propelled car about a century ago.”
Rubbish! Of course they did. Do you think that no-one had any vision before you were born?
Anyway, you’re so smart – tell us why we need a useless tablet when we have all manner of things that do more than a tablet can already.
Our friend, Bollocks, missed my point entirely. Very often, people are unable to identify or articulate their needs. Oftentimes, they don’t even know they have a need for something. Henry ford said “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.” If he, and others in his business, listened to his customers, today, we would be riding in horse-drawn carriages, pulled by steroid-fed mutant horses.
Two years ago, when iPhone didn’t exist even in Apple-related blogosphere, people were tossing around idea of combining a cellphone and an iPod. Many myopic sceptics (such as our fiend Bollocks here) were saying: “A combined phone and iPod would be a colossal flop; why on earth would anyone want to buy a phone that is not such a great phone, and an iPod that is not a great iPod???” The old, ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’ argument. Along the lines of: “If I want my music, i take my iPod; if I need to make calls, I take my cellphone.” We all know how well that argument held water.
I am not sure just yet why we need a tablet; I won’t pretend I’m smarter than I really am. I know I’d probably like to have it. Tablet concept follow by far the most intuitive way of interacting with printed text, or blank pad. When we read a book, we hold it in our hands in front of us. When we write down notes, we do that on a pad, or a sheet of paper. Over the years, we have forced ourselves to get used to the idea of doing something on an artificial construct (the keyboard) and expecting results of that work to appear on another device elsewhere. Touching a surface and seeing it respond to this touch is by far more intuitive.
Let’s allow Jobs/Ive team to give it to us. I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes an iPhone-scale hit (in terms of sales volume, not physical size, of course).
@ Bollocks:
There’s already a Mac tablet, and I do find it useful. I’ve had it since January 30, 2008. It’s the Axiotron ModBook with a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 4 GB RAM and 200 GB 7,200 rpm hard drive. It’s running OS X 10.5.2 And it’s my fastest laptop Mac.
I’ve got a first-generation MacBook Pro with 2 GB RAM. Yes, I could buy a current MacBook Pro with 4 GB RAM, for less money than I paid for my ModBook. But I’ve always wanted digitizer pen input for some purposes, such as a note including chemical or math equations, and perhaps a sketched graph or diagram. Neither keyboarding nor touch screen input can do that quickly and easily.
I’ve never liked to use a clamshell notebook like my MacBook Pro in my lap. It’s really awkward to use the keyboard and the screen has to be tilted a bit to be readable. So the term “laptop” isn’t quit apt.
By contrast, the ModBook is really comfortable to use in my lap, resting on my knee. That puts the screen at the right angle for reading, and for pen entry of notes.
I do a lot of reading on the ModBook. I work with large DEVONthink Pro Office document dtabases containing tens of thousands of references and notes. So think of the ModBook as a great ebook reader, with the capacity to accept handwritten notes and drawings.
Of course, I can type faster than I can write. So when I’m doing serious writing the ModBook sits in a bookstand, accepting input from my Apple wireless keyboard and mouse via a Bluetooth USB adapter.
This was written with a digitizer pen, while sitting in an easy chair.
I doubt that Apple plans release of a tablet that has the all-purpose power of my ModBook, at least not in the near future. But one of these days!
Seriously, how many times is this rumor going to resurface?
I’m ready for Steve to walk out on stage and just stare intently at the audience for a full two minutes before saying “Seriously? Tablets are poo poo.”
Let me bring up another small form factor device thats selling like hot cakes – the Amazon Kindle. Apple might be able to bridge the gap between applications and content (iTunes) with a device like this. The Kindle has very limited abilities and suffers from poor design, but its been a money maker. Just some random thinking.
Hasn’t Bill Gates already proved that nobody really wants to buy a tablet?
The iPhone and iPod Touch IS the Mac tablet, folks. I would instead like an 10″ rugged eMate style Airbook, minus the strongarm processor and green screen and instead a core2 duo and an iSight and a 10″ LED. No optical, just a 64 gig flash drive.
“shen: “Deliver by Thursday?”
O.K., it will be A Thursday.”
oh you are a big help……
“Let me bring up another small form factor device thats selling like hot cakes – the Amazon Kindle.”
any proof (aside from amazon saying they sold out) that they are selling well? the only information i have seen so far is that they are not selling all that well, and only to people over 55. i am willing to believe other wise, but i haven’t seen any information yet.
The Mac tablet could be the ultimate Trojan horse. If for example, you could connect it to even your Windows machine and run OS X off of it.
I can’t imagine it would be too hard to do that…
gimme a 16″ tablet with iCal and the ability to sync my wife’s and my calendars…
airport express the ability to create categorys. Then have the stylus do the medial tasks…
have it display photos in the meantime.
$400 – I’d buy it.
Follow up…
It would hang by our fridge.
perfect for two working parents with 3 kids who each have to be different places after school.
re: The spotted and flowered iMacs. Why? The were dopey and ugly.
—
For your information these mac have been the most successful macs to date.
They introduced Apple to mass markets in schools and homes.
They are a design classic and a revolutionary piece of design that won countless international design awards.
So dont write off the mac that saved Apple and was the 1st mac out of the gates when Jobs returned to Apple.
It’s not that there is no use for a tablet, or that MS has proven nobody wants a table – Gates only proved that nobody wants a Windows tablet. It’s just that the ENTIRE PACKAGE has not been put together or will be for a while because the software aren’t there yet. Apple may have some prototypes, but exactly what software applications do you put on a generic big Newton to make it perfectly functional for what it’s mean to do, at the perfect size and UI, with a price point in between a laptop and the iPhone? When the business model is ready – akin to the App Store/iTunes – you’ll see the device.
Acb “It would hang by our fridge.” Why not use a Post-it note?
Google has a picture of someone using a ModBook propped up with a rag. It seems a laptop is more ergonomic.
Still, it would be cool to have a super-thin Mac Tablet Media Center, controller iTunes, Photos, and Videos on your home entertainment center…
“The new Apple tablet would also mark the return of handwriting recognition to the Mac for the first time since the Newton was killed on February 27, 1998 after Jobs returned to Apple.”
Unless you count Inkwell.
Oops, my bad, he mentions it in an Update.
FatMac – if you had kids (3 under 12) – you’d understand the beauty of this product.
ha – my magic word is even “children”
@ FatMac:
Often I read a book while eating at my breakfast table. Gee, if I open the book and lay it flat on the table, it’s hard to read — poor ergonomics. I hadn’t thought of propping it up with a rag — sounds stupid.
Instead, I put the book on a bookstand. They’ve been around for quite some years and are pretty cheap. That’s good ergonomics for reading at my breakfast table.
The same bookstands work great with my ModBook when I’m sitting at a table or desk. It holds tens of thousands of notes, articles and books in my DEVONthink Pro databases. Or I can comfortably browse the Web and download new material while chewing on a sausage-egg-cheese biscuit. Much more ergonomic than a clamshell laptop in that setting, and there’s not a keyboard to get greasy and be in the way; this is a time when the pen is mightier than the keyboard.
Anytime I need to type, my Apple wireless keyboard and mouse are at hand. But I don’t like to type while I’m eating or drinking coffee; it takes two hands to type. I don’t like to type when I’m sitting in an easy chair in front of the fireplace, either — it’s much more ergonomic to write on my ModBook’s screen to answer email.
But I guess soft lint-free rags are OK for polishing a car, although there are better tools.
The same domain holding company that Apple uses for locking in domain names has purchased recently the name “islate”.