The Mac rumor mill was swirling at full speed this week with speculation that Apple was hard at work on a “MacBook Touch”. This rumor is not new. Buzz about a tablet MacBook has been around for years. But what is fueling the speculation this time around is the wild success of the iPhone 3G.
Should this rumor turn out to be true (and there is no guarantee that it will) it would be another brilliant coup by Apple. Tablet PCs have been around for quite a while yet have never really taken off, accounting for only one percent of the laptop consumer market. Several models, including the Toshiba M700 that I use, include touch input (although to be fair, it’s nowhere near as responsive or accurate as my iPhone 3G). But if any company can popularize the concept, it’s Apple. It’s scores of iFans will swoon over the latest product just as they did for the iPhone 3G and MacBook Air. It won’t matter that there already are some solid tablets our there from Toshiba, Dell, HP, and others.
Apple will put its own twist on the product to give it a wide appeal to the consumer base as they have done with most of their products. And the devoted followers who believe every Apple product “just works” (tell that to MobileMe subscribers) will hail this as the newest, greatest iteration of Apple technology. If the Dalai Jobs builds it, they will come.