Man, if I had a dollar for every time I heard this in the last 10 years….Oh, wait, I bought Apple stock at 15. I actually DO have a dollar for every time someone says that! Thanks for having no vision guys! It leaves the market open for someone with actual IDEAS other than "more features at a cheaper price" which will kill netbooks if anything will. The cheaper and crappier and less reliable and more complicated netbooks become, the shorter the lifespan will be for them. The PC world eats it's young, typically.

Wow, quite a bit of ignorance on display there. Most people who buy netbooks don't buy them as a primary computer. They're usually a second or even third machine, so the argument that netbook users are "too cheap to pay more" is falacious.

Netbooks fill a very specific market. They're meant to be inexpensive and highly portable word processing, email, internet, etc. machines. Ditching a physical keyboard is a bad idea right off the bat since it's no longer well suited to the first two uses. If Apple sells a tablet with no physical keyboard (forget about having a peripheral. If it's full size then the portability compared to a netbook takes a nose dive), and less power then you're essentially left with a large iPhone you're paying as much as $700 for. The iPhone may be a great phone, but not at a $700 price point, even if it is bigger.

I have no doubt though, that if Apple does release such a tablet it will sell well to the Mac fans. They're generally not too bothered by paying more for less hardware wise so long as they never have to think about their machines inner workings and can take it to someone else to fix when something small goes wrong. But PC users, and those looking for functionality for their dollar are not going to be sold on it.

And Apple expects me to pay $500-$700 for it? In the words of some TV gangster… "FUGGEDABOUTIT!!"

For $500, I'll go for a netbook where I will be able to run Microsoft Office (which, BTW, Apple hasn't come up with anything better), and still have change left over.

Its a small 10" screen Mac with a laser scanned keyboard and a touch screen.

- 400 g weight or less. The less weight, the better. Hint: the MacBook Air is too heavy.

- Small. If possible, pocketable. 7-inch better than 10-inch. Hint: the MacBook Air is too large.

-Open and edit Keynote and PowerPoint NATIVE presentations.

- Full blown presentations on videoprojectors (VGA-out is a RE-MUST).

Remember: this device is NOT for heavy work on it, but mainly as a pocketable device for presentations and casual editing when you are rehearsing and reviewing your presentation. Check the first picture of:

Next Apple moves will be Books and Games…

http://spidouz.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/next-apple-moves-will-be-books-and-games

Can Apple deliver. We need thousands for our University. The price is not a problem. But we need it light and small.

The only thing I'm really worried about, that with all this advance notice, any company can easily upstage Apple with their own version of a tablet. Those competitor companies will throw in the kitchen sink as far as features go and they'll sell it for even less than netbooks. Apple's pad will be very low on hardware features, but high on usability and software, especially if it's going to be able to run all the iPhone/iPod platform software. The other companies are going to have SDHC slots and fingerprint readers and probably USB ports. The Apple tablet won't have any of that stuff. Without a USB port, probably no corporation will want to use it, knowing how they love that standardized port stuff.

Apple is going to lose out big-time on this one if it waits until next year to release a tablet. RIM will probably release one with it's famous BlackBerry chicklet keyboard and that will be that for Apple. All the major corporations would go with the RIM tablet.

1. Partitioning the platform between open PC-like layers (i.e., download apps from anywhere) and managed/closed runtime layers (App Store is THE marketplace with a singular SDK, APIs, etc.) is a potential hornet's nest of technical, user experience and ecosystem decisions.

2. Such a device is a logical point for Apple to define forking decisions between abstractions and uniformity, relative to supporting all sorts of different form factors under this platform (e.g., Macs, Apple TV, iPhone, iPod touch, Tablet, keyboard, touch/tilt only, camera, video, TV tuner).

For more fodder on the topic, check out the post:

Apple, TV and the Smart Connected Living Room

http://bit.ly/FBEk

Cheers,

Mark

It would remain on your desk, so by plugging you tablet you get mini-laptop.

You could even carry it with you attached to the keyboard, if you feel the need.

But ultimately it would be a multi-touch tablet to my satisfaction.