Are the long-lasting rumours of a Mac tablet PC about to turn into reality?
As mentioned a few posts ago,
big changes are coming from Apple
.
Apple's Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer mentioned this directly during the release of Apple's last-quarter financial results. Oppenheimer said several more "wonderful new products" would be launched "soon".
This was reported by
and many others.
He promised that these state-of-the-art products would have technologies and features that others "can't match", but since then Apple has said little more.
Of course, speculation has really ramped up since then, with a video, even, of a purported (or mock, or make-believe)
I have warned about Apple rumours before - you really can't get too excited. Well, you can - just not about specifics. Before the release of the stunning v3 iMac (of which the current model is an increment), all sorts of rumours were doing the rounds, none coming very close to the release that stunned Apple watchers.
I must point out once again that rumours of an Apple tablet have been in circulation for years. Reports
considered credible at one point
suggested a 2003 release for this product. It does seem clear that Apple has had the technology for a long time already.
Steve Jobs said in 2003 that "We're not sure the tablet PC will be successful. It's turned into a notebook that you can write on. Do you want to handwrite all your email? We have all the technology ourselves to do that - we just don't know whether it will be successful."
Presumably the technologies encompassed in the slim MacBook Air and developments with the iPhone and iPod touch have made any markets clearer.
Just to make matters more interesting, in 2003 there were also rumours of a 17-inch Apple laptop. These were dismissed as fanciful, but a 17-inch laptop did ship as a bigger, faster PowerBook G4.
Apple often has things percolating away in its secrecy-enshrouded labs, like the so-called 'Marklar' project that supposedly had Windows running on Macs years before Intel chips and Apple's Boot Camp software actually made this possible for consumers.
Anyway, back to those
, ABC News described the purported product so: "Think MacBook screen, possibly a bit smaller, in glass with iPhone-like, but fuller-featured Multi-Touch. Gesture library. Full Mac OS X." It looks like ABC picked this up in turn from
.
Seth Weintraub at ComputerWorld says the
new models will be thinner than current MacBook and MacBook Pros
, slightly more rounded, and have a glass trackpad supporting multi-touch and gesture support.
Weintraub thinks the screen itself won't be multi-touch. The body will be created from one piece of aluminium. Please note that Weintraub is also the owner of the Mac fan site 9to5Mac, which embedded the video linked above.
Weintraub guesses a tablet Mac would most likely use new Intel Centrino 2 platform chips (quite understandably) and the screen would have a 16:9 aspect - also logical.
Personally, I would be happy to move things around by touch-screen but I would not want to write a story on a non tactile piece of glass. Editing images in something like Photoshop might be pretty cool, though.
Anyway, hopefully we'll know what's been cooking 'soon'.
Living in the future - where there's less driver chatter.