Apple Tablet In 2010
Apple (AAPL) is reportedly working on a “media pad” tablet to fit between its iPod touch and MacBook devices. The idea is that it'd be better for surfing the Web, watching movies, and reading books than the iPod or iPhone, but not powerful enough that it would crush notebook sales.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the moment the Apple tablet rumor acquires numbers and an adversary. After a January 2008 Macworld prediction, SAI's own December call for an iPod touch HD, and a February patent filing sketching the industrial design, the story now carries a reported $500-$700 price and an explicit target: the netbook market. That specificity is why AppleInsider and CNET's Between the Lines both picked up the report on the same day.
What keeps this credible rather than wishful is that the supporting pieces are already public. The App Store has passed one billion downloads in nine months with an estimated $20-45m in revenue, a confirmed Apple job posting seeks an iPhone programmer with detailed ARM and NEON vector-unit knowledge, and Snow Leopard is rumored to gain native 3G wireless WAN support. The pitch — a bigger screen for web, movies, and books, deliberately short of MacBook power — reads as a managed-cannibalization exercise inside Apple's own lineup.
First-order effects
- The reported $500-$700 price band places the device directly against the netbooks PC makers have been using to ride out the downturn, giving them a premium touch-first competitor they did not plan for.
- Apple's own framing — better than an iPod touch for web, video, and reading, but not powerful enough to crush MacBook sales — means the first casualty risk is internal pricing architecture across its three existing lines.
Second-order effects
- The confirmed ARM/NEON hiring, read alongside the rumored push into more powerful Apple-designed mobile processors, points to Apple sourcing the tablet's horsepower from its own iPhone chip lineage instead of commodity PC silicon.
- If Snow Leopard ships with native 3G wireless WAN support as rumored, a tablet arrives carrier-ready out of the box, pulling wireless operators into a device category they currently only reach through laptops and phones.
Third-order effects
- One billion app downloads in nine months gives Apple demand-side economics no netbook vendor can match, potentially sustaining a third device category between phone and laptop rather than a niche experiment.
- If the pattern holds, the netbook becomes a transition product: cheap small laptops lose their role as the default answer to portable computing once a touch device with an app store occupies the same price band.
The trend: Personal computing is splitting into three tiers — pocket, tablet, notebook — with App Store economics and Apple's in-house ARM silicon underwriting the middle tier that netbooks were supposed to own.