Apple tablet – real or rumor?
As 2009 comes to a close, Apple has still not as much as commented on the hottest scuttlebutt of the year, the iTablet, leaving the fate of the hottest rumors of the past year swaying in the breeze.
It’s going to be a pretty big letdown for Apple fans if Steve Jobs springs up onto the Yerba Buena stage in late January, bounces over to the center in the limelight, and tells the assembled multitudes about the latest iPod to have a built-in camera. The deflation would probably be so devastating that the Bay Area will be at risk of a decompression earthquake if the announcement is not something big about the iTablet. In other words, after months and months of speculation and rumor, the tablet computer from Cupertino had better be making an appearance soon or even the hardcore Apple fanboys will start to lose interest.
The latest rumors come from former Google China president Kai-Fu Lee, according to a story on PC World. Why Lee should have any better information than anyone else in the business is beyond me, but here’s what he says: “Most surprising: Apple predicts production of nearly 10 million [units] in the first year!” Lee says that in a post on a Chinese micro-blog service that cited information from a source he described as a “knowledgeable friend.†The tablet, the friend says, will look like a large iPhone and come with a 10.1-inch multi-touch touchscreen, a virtual keyboard and support for videoconferencing and e-books. That’s news?
None of Lees “information†is even vaguely new. It has all been reported before, many times. What we need are some facts, rather than more guesses, estimates, scuttlebutt, fabrications, suppositions, innuendo, gossip, whisperings, hearsay, and words from the grapevine. There is some (rather flexible) limit to how long a rumor can be interesting. Sort of like the wait between DaVinci’s drawing and a real helicopter. The iTablet rumors are a year old, at least. At some point, rumor has to stop and fiction needs to be called fiction. As I recall, the fast-tracked Mazda Miata went from concept to car in a year. You’d think that Apple could do better than that with a slightly bigger iPod Touch.
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