Blatantly obvious...

Nov 7, 2007 13:58 GMT  ·  By

The iPhone was nothing but a rumor for years before Apple actually announced it as an actual product, being the subject of many reports and inside information. Much like it, the Mac tablet is also another rumor that has been around for ages and which is still as popular as ever.

This year, the Mac tablet slipped under the radar. Between the announcement of Apple's handset and the more recent sub-notebook rumors, there was just no room for yet another mythical portable device, and people were just too hyped about the iPhone. Now, the tablet has come back in full force, after a CNET's Rory Reid reported that "Asus is helping Apple build a Tablet PC."

While reports about Apple's manufacturers are not unusual, and sometimes you get slips from CEOs that are too eager to tell the world they are working for Apple, such disclosure about a top secret Apple device is highly unlikely. The one thing that everybody knows about Apple as a company, is that they value secrecy, and Steve Jobs has been known to be less than understanding when anyone lifts the veil, no matter how little. The first rule of working with Apple is 'you do not talk about working with Apple,' and considering that Asus has been their manufacturer for years, they must know this all too well. All this does not mean that Apple is most definitely not working on such a tablet project, it just means that Asus employees that actually own such information are not very likely to ignore their NDAs and the very strong threat of being fired just to give some bloke the inside scoop on Apple's latest project.

At the end of the day, much like the iPod touch was an obvious product the second the iPhone was announced, a big screen version sometime in the future is inevitable. At the very least, such a device would offer everything that the current iPod touch does, as well as Mail and everything else that was also tossed out with the phone part. But such a device needs to be able to do a lot more, if not on par with a MacBook, such a tablet would have to at least come half way. This means an open device, on which people can install any OS X application, or at least a host of Apple approved iPhone applications, and that may take a while.