More Apple tablet rumors
The rumors of a tablet computer from Apple are firing up again, with some ideas that make a lot of sense from both the technical and marketing points of view coming to the fore.
For several months, rumors of an Apple netbook have been having gentle collisions with rumors of an Apple tablet computer. That the two sets of rumors would merge into one cohesive rumor set seemed inevitable. It now appears that Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has put all of the pieces together into a single rumor that makes a lot of sense.
Munster says that he believes that Apple will launch a tablet computer about halfway through 2010, which would make it just about a year away. He points out the “gaping hole” in Apple’s product line, essentially between the iPod Touch and the MacBook, according to a ZDNet article. He thinks that the new Apple tablet is being readied to fill this gap, selling for somewhere between $500 and $700.
Moreover, the tablet will serve as Apple’s entry into the netbook marketplace. As we will all remember, Apple big boss Tim Cook has said that netbooks seemed junky. He did not say that there was not a demand for them. But a $300 mini-MacBook is just not Apple’s style. A giant evolutionary step upwards from the iPod Touch is very much Apple’s style.
This is a fairly massive undertaking because it represents a new step in the personal computer food chain. That is why Munster does not expect it to be out anytime soon. If nothing else, he feels that it will have an operating system somewhere between iPhone OS 3.0 and OS X. Something like that does not get developed over night.
Specifically, Munster says, “We are anticipating a new category of Apple products with an operating system more robust than the iPhone’s but optimized for multi-touch, unlike Mac OS X. The device’s OS could bear a close resemblance to Apple’s mobile OS and run App Store apps, or it could be a modified version of Mac OS X. We expect the development of such an OS to be underway currently, but its complexity, along with our conversations with a key company in the mobile space, leads us to believe it will not launch until CY10.”
Rather than follow the netbook trend, Apple has once again chosen to innovate instead. The concept behind this new tablet would fall perfectly into line with the thoughts often expressed in this column about a truly portable, powerful computing device being the wave of future computing. The Apple tablet projected by Munster seems like another giant step in that direction.
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May 21st, 2009
Funny how ‘investor speak’ is simply chatter thats spraying what’s already known except he’s gambling a date for it so he can leach investor $$$.
August 21st, 2009
Amazing! Apple Mac Book has already been very popular and now this technology may rock the world.
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