Like a soufflé puffing on hot air, rumors of an Apple tablet continued to
rise over the long holiday weekend, buoyed by absolutely no official comment
from the company itself over whether it intended to produce such a multitouch
device in 2010.
Apple-centric blogs, notably MacRumors, have sniffed out that Apple may have possibly acquired the domain name
islate.com. While typing the URL into a browser yields only a "Page Load Error,"
MacRumors apparently dug into the domain name registrant history for the site
and found that, in late 2007, Apple Inc. was indeed the Registrant of record for
the site.
The name "iSlate," according to TechCrunch, was registered as a trademark three years ago;
according to the blog, the company doing the registering, Slate Computing, could
possibly be an Apple dummy corporation.
In late October, Bill Keller, the executive editor at The New York Times, also alluded to "the impending Apple
slate."
However, the question
remains whether Keller was referring to "Slate," proper noun, or
"slate," as in "upcoming slate of products." Other reports at the same
time suggested that
Apple was in talks with publishing companies over porting their content
onto an
Apple device.
Additionally fueling the rumors over the weekend was a report in the
Financial Times blog, widely disseminated, which quoted unnamed inside sources
as saying that Apple had rented the stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
in San Francisco, for several days near the end of January.
A "major product announcement" would be made on that stage come Jan. 26,
the sources suggested.
Boy Genius Report also posted on Dec. 23 that "one of our very
connected sources let us know that they’ve heard very solid information about
Apple’s upcoming tablet…our connect said there is 100 [percent] a 7" Apple
tablet, to be announced in January." Boy Genius emphasized that the source had "been amazingly accurate for us in the past."
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who has spent the past several months
digging into the possibilities of an Apple tablet, recently estimated in a research note that there
was a 75 percent likelihood that Apple would host an event in
January, and a 50 percent chance
that said event would be used to launch a tablet.
Despite the omnipresent rumors, Apple has followed its typical pattern in
keeping any official pronouncements about a device tamped down. An Aug. 24
report in The Wall Street Journal suggested that
CEO Steve Jobs was devoting a substantial
chunk of time to the creation of a tablet PC, an article that led Jobs himself
to e-mail the newspaper that, "most of your information is incorrect."
Apple also filed a series of patents over the
course of 2009, including one for
a touch screen that can be manipulated with the fingers of both hands as well as
the palms, that many conjectured were ultimately for the technology behind a
tablet.
Gene Munster has suggested in previous notes that the tablet could be
based off the iPhone OS, with apps designed for a larger screen, or else a
modified version of the Mac OS X. Oppenheimer & Co. financial analyst Yair
Reiner posited in a Dec. 8
research note that the tablet would be released in late March or April, and
include a 10.1-inch touch screen; in addition, Reiner cited unnamed sources as
telling him that "Apple is approaching book publishers with a very attractive
proposal for distributing their content."
Apple may also integrate 3G wireless into the device, these and other
analysts have theorized, which potentially opens the door to a deal between
Apple and a wireless carrier. While AT&T currently supports the iPhone,
recent criticism of its network could potentially lead Apple to back a rival
such as Verizon. Analyst guesses as to a tablet retail price have generally
ranged from $500 to nearly $2,000, before the cost of a potential data plan is
factored in.
But until Apple makes an official announcement, all this remains
conjecture.
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