Nothing like an impending Apple announcement to get multitudes – from the casual observer to the rabid supporter – talking about it. And hey, since we fall somewhere in that range, it was time for us to weigh in with our thoughts on the Apple Tablet Mac.
Now, some sharp readers here may remember a post by OWC Michael in early December about how the Mac tablet is already shipping. While there was a bit of nudge nudge wink wink in that post, the truth remains today as it did back then:
If you want a pen based Mac tablet computer running OS X that you can draw and write on, our Modbook or Modservice gives you a full computing experience and then some.
Meanwhile, we’re hearing there is a conference center being rented for end of January to discuss a device that will maybe have a 7-10″ screen and cost around $1,000.
And that the device will also be an e-book reader to take some thunder away from the Kindle.
Perhaps the best terms I’ve heard used to describe this impending announcement is an iPhone on steroids or a ginormous iPod. That doesn’t exactly sound like a computer to me. Desktop and notebooks are what I define as a computer. They run business oriented apps (WP, speadsheets, databases, graphics, etc.). You start going down to a netbook…and now perhaps a new term for this new category – webpad – and the lines of what truly can be called a computer – or at least one that can be easily used to run the aforementioned apps – are getting blurry to my old eyes. And we won’t even touch on the subject of one fingered typing…
All of the pre-announcement hype seems to be a Touch Too Much…heavy sounding for sure, but when it comes down to it, the proposed product appears to be a glorified iPod Touch with a bigger screen. Certainly not the Holy Grail, but if it features a full sized QWERTY keyboard for us Baby Boomers, I might just get off my Grinch and proclaim it a highly worthy product.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit any shortcomings on my prediction of this impending product being just a bigger iPod Touch. After all, it seems many other “experts” were off on their original iPhone predictions.
In the end though, I can’t help thinking about what George Costanza would say to impending product announcements.
