October 23, 2008, 3:40 AM — Hey, you might recall a couple of days ago when I nodded approvingly at Jon Gruber's Apple netbook speculation; he thought that such a device would much more likely take the form of a souped-up iPhone than a cut-down MacBook. Steve Jobs himself said on Apple's latest earnings call that "We don't know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk."
And yet ... New York Times blogger John Markoff got some kind of inside tip from a search engine company that some kind of unannounced Apple product with screen resolution bigger than an iPhone and smaller than a Macbook had been detected in the wild via its user agent string. Now, of course, user agent strings are easy to spoof, and presumably Apple has lots of skunkwork projects that never see the light of day but presumably do surf the Web from deep inside the company's Cupertino lair. Still, everyone should feel free to work themselves up into some kind of iPhone/Mac Netbook hybrid whosit frenzy for the next three to six months.
Follow Josh on Google+
