November 20, 2009, 2:56 PM — Oh, look, it's a story from Digitimes, always your favorite source for news and rumors from deep within the Chinese supply chain that supplies the global electronic industry with its component parts! Apparently that Apple Tablet, the one that there's been no official word on of any sort but that everyone is convinced will help its users transcend to a higher plane of awesomeness, is going to be delayed, and expensive!
I'm not going to get too much into the details here, because most people seem to agree that they're confusing and don't really make much sense, but the short story is that (a) the make-believe release date of Q1 '10 has been pushed by to Q4 '10, (b) there will be multiple models with oddly similar screen sizes (10.6 inches vs. 9.7), and (c) the high-end will cost something like $2,000 retail.
Now, as I've said repeatedly, I've had my doubts that even an ideal tablet would be a good idea, and I'm constantly amused by the pronouncements verging on certainty about a gadget nobody who hasn't signed an NDA in blood has seen. So the explosion of chatter that appeared in the wake of this rumor has me highly amused. In terms of the price, I simply can't conceive of who would pay two grand for a non-computer computing tablet, when you could spend substantially less on an actual computer. If you're going to end up with something in this price range, wouldn't it have been simpler to have changed the hinge on the MacBook so you can fold it into a tablet? But even funnier to me is the range of responses to the new rumor's disruption of the previous entirely rumor-based consensus. Some are insisting that the shifting date is meaningless, others that it means that the tablet is dead. My question is: was it ever alive in the first place?
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