Robert Cringley’s Thoughts On An Apple iTablet

The Apple / iTablet rumor mill buzz has never been at such a high pitch than what it is right now. With Macworld coming up next month, we can only expect the noise to get much more intense.

PBS.org’s Robert Cringley penned a great article on why he think’s Apple is indeed coming out with iTablet, and it is based on some quite good reasoning. Here is a snippet along with a link to his full article. Thanks for the link, Loren.

The next logical WebKit product for Apple, it seems to me, is a much larger version of the iPod Touch. It would be Apple’s first tablet computer and, while they’ll still claim it runs OS X, Apple WON’T call it a Mac.

I’m not the only person thinking like this. Here’s more from an old friend who is much smarter than me. He sees an Apple tablet coming in January for five simple reasons:

1) Because MacWorld in January is when Apple stuns the world with improvements and innovations. A well-designed tablet could be a great innovation. An SDK for February 2008, not for just iPhone but for multi-touch devices in general, including a newly available iTablet– that would be stunning.

2) Because a multi-touch tablet would provide a patent-protected interface for a new class of communication and computer device that Microsoft and its hardware partners would be hard-pressed to clone. The question now is does one get a Mac or a PC? There would be no PC analog to a well-designed Mac tablet, so if an iTablet is compelling, the question then becomes more like, when can I get one?