March 11, 2009, 10:54 PM — Let's say that you were confronted with the following paragraph:
Wintek revealed that it is currently working with Apple to develop some new products, but it said it does not know what applications the new products are for. Wintek added that no shipment schedule has been worked out yet, but shipments are likely to begin in the second half of the year.
Would you (a) blink, think "Hmm, Apple must have some new stuff in the pipeline," and move on, or (b) use it as the core of a story headlined "Wintek to supply touch panels for Apple netbook, says paper"?
(b), obviously, is guaranteed to roil the Apple rumorsphere and get pageviews, though forgive me if I don't see it as a logical conclusion. There's also a Dow Jones report about Apple ordering 10-inch-or-so touchscreens, which seems to be from a different source. From these little touches, much hue and cry has been released over the past 48 hours or insisting that the Apple netbook is coming this year, and will be touch-screen only.
Assuming there's anything to this, I have a lot of trouble with the latter half of that speculation. A netbook without a keyboard isn't a netbook, it's a tablet. And tablets haven't really worked out for anyone, and a Mac tablet has been one of those Any Day Now products for years at this point. Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research, says, "With Apple's hostility to keyboards in general, I think this will be a touch-based device," which, I'm sorry, is particularly laughable. Apple has released exactly two keyboardless products that compete with keyboarded gadgets: the iPhone and iPod Touch (which are really variations on the same design). You can question those choices (and Apple isn't even the only one makign them), but that doesn't exactly add up to "hostility."
Here's the thing: if this supposed Apple netbook is going to have any kind of PC-like functionality beyond what's currently on the iPhone or iPod Touch -- I'm thinking word processing or spreadsheets -- then you need a real keyboard. You can't take notes in class or write a report during a plane ride on the iPhone's virtual keyboard. You just can't. Conversely, if all this hypothetical Apple netbook is going to deliver is Web surfing and email capabilities, well, it has no reason to exist, because the iPhone and iPod Touch do all that just fine. I don't think people are going to bother lugging around even a smallish tablet just so that they can have a bigger Web-surfing screen.
A possible configuration that might explain the touchscreen, but still leave room for a keyboard: if, as I've speculated so often that I've come to actually believe it, the Apple netbook runs some kind of souped-up version of the iPhone OS, there won't be any mouse pointer in a classic sense. You'll still need to tap the screen to interact with onscreen commands, but actual typing will be done via a physical keyboard. This could be clunky, or it could be brilliant, or it might not happen at all. When you're reading tea leaves as intently as Apple rumormongers are wont to do, you've got to just make things up sometimes. Like Apple's hostility towards keyboards.
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