Apple Tablet – Expensive Netbook or iTouch on Steroids?

The rumors about the Apple $800 tablet have been circulating long enough now that everyone’s starting to mentally reverse engineer what this device might be. Is the Apple Tablet a netbook? Its supposed $800 price tag would technically disqualify it as a netbook by many definitions (sub $399 devices). Will it run Mac OS X or the iPhone OS? Or is it just a giant iTouch suffering from an overactive pituitary gland problem? Frankly, I could see it going either way but two things make me think the Apple Tablet is more of an iPhone than a Mac laptop.First, as far as I know, the Mac OS X doesn’t support multi-touch interfaces. It would be a pretty big feat to roll Cocoa Touch features back into Mac OS X without that rumor leaking out. Not that it can’t or won’t be done, I think it actually will happen, but app developers would need this new OS and the device in their hands now to start adapting and developing apps on an enhanced Mac OS X. That doesn’t appear to be happening from what I can see.The other factor is the rumored distribution channel. Verizon. Is Verizon getting into the netbook / laptop market to compete with one of their major distributors, Best Buy? Will they open mini Apple stores inside Verizon stores to sell a tablet laptop? All things are possible, but that doesn’t seem very likely.Now you might argue that the reason Apple put the Mac OS X on a diet by releasing a trimmed up Mac OS X with greater performance, is so it could run on a lower end device like a tablet. There’s an argument to be made there, but I’m not sure that’s enough to convince me the tablet will be a mini Mac laptop. I just think that because of the iPhone’s overwhelming success, Apple would want to ride that wave rather than introduce the Apple Table with Mac laptop roots.The Apple Tablet will most likely grow out of the iPhone and iTouch genre. That poses its own problems though. Adapting apps to a bigger screen format. Maybe we’ll see little emulator windows showing iPhone apps running on a virtual iPhone (like the emulator in Xcode), and then apps developed for the bigger foot print running full screen. It’s hard to say. That would still take software development by vendors to create new apps for the tablet device. More importantly, maybe the Apple Tablet will introduce multiprocessing to the iPhone OS so we can stop hearing those Palm Pre adds about it being the first and only multiprocessing web os. I’m still waiting for Switcher on the iPhone, lol.The jury is still out on all this of course. Whatever the outcome, Apple’s got a good track record of bringing out consumer devices that match customer needs better than most. I’m still not convinced there’s really a netbook market when lower end laptops keep creeping into the sub-$400 range.The Apple Tablet debate continues.

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Great Beginning and Intermediate Books Mitchell Recommends:

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