I have reason to believe these are real, and that the person who took/released them purposefully manipulated the reflections to add doubt about their authenticity.
No offense, but I've just consed Dustin Curtis onto my "tired of their blog" list (along with Mike Arrington and Jeff Atwood). So much self-aggrandizing hype, so little actual information...
I think that for this new product, if it is as important as they say, they will come up with a radically new look -- especially now since so many competitors are copying the iphone and macbook pro looks to confusion. Perhaps they will abandon the monotone theme and have some candy colors again.
I mean it would be pretty disappointing if they just made a bigger iPod Touch and called it "Revolutionary".
So the look of the device is more important than the functionality when deciding whether or not something is 'Revolutionary?' Apple may well design something new, but it's not like they have to make it so utterly and completely different from the iPhone, iPod or MacBook-line for it to be revolutionary.
Eh. I think if Apple released something with roughly these specs:
- circa 9" screen
- razor thin with a super clean design
- reasonable battery life (~2hrs at least)
- a multi-touch screen and the UI tweaks to maximize that potential
- a workable on screen pseudo-keyboard
- built in wifi/3G and just about nothing else
(no optical drive, no vga out, maybe not even a usb port)
- decent performance specs for the netbook range
(e.g. atom/core2 cpu, 1gb ram or more, high-performance SSD)
Given that, even if it's not a "radically new look", I think they'd make a killing (technical term: a metric pants-load of filthy lucre). Sure, it may not revolutionize the world, and it may be more of an iterative design improvement than anything else, but it would be enormously desirable to an amazingly large segment of the market. And it's hard to complain about that (if you're the seller), regardless of whether it's yet another thin, shiny, white computing device.
Also, even though something like what I described above (which is pretty similar to what a lot of other people expect from Apple, no doubt) may not be revolutionary but it would still represent trailblazing on Apple's part. Currently the netbook market is synonymous with discount computing. If you want a small form factor, low power system you'll end up sacrificing a lot of quality and a lot of performance almost regardless of how much money you are willing to spend. So if you want a small form factor system with fabulous battery life and you want a rockin' high-performance SSD you are forced to make an after market modification. The high-end in the notebook space skews very sharply toward larger systems and toward desktop replacement or gaming laptops. If Apple releases a premium quality netbook size tablet (which seems likely) they would essentially be creating a new premium netbook market. Which is hardly a bad thing for consumers whose needs are currently not being met by the market.
I guess this isn't that shocking because we all know what tablet computers look like. Do we really need to leak early photos? Oh, it looks like a tablet computer. How surprising!
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 30.5 ms ] threadNo offense, but I've just consed Dustin Curtis onto my "tired of their blog" list (along with Mike Arrington and Jeff Atwood). So much self-aggrandizing hype, so little actual information...
But this isn't on my real blog, it's on my Posterous. I separate them on purpose.
Also, this being on Hacker News really irritates me. I don't think it should be here.
I think that for this new product, if it is as important as they say, they will come up with a radically new look -- especially now since so many competitors are copying the iphone and macbook pro looks to confusion. Perhaps they will abandon the monotone theme and have some candy colors again.
I mean it would be pretty disappointing if they just made a bigger iPod Touch and called it "Revolutionary".
Also, even though something like what I described above (which is pretty similar to what a lot of other people expect from Apple, no doubt) may not be revolutionary but it would still represent trailblazing on Apple's part. Currently the netbook market is synonymous with discount computing. If you want a small form factor, low power system you'll end up sacrificing a lot of quality and a lot of performance almost regardless of how much money you are willing to spend. So if you want a small form factor system with fabulous battery life and you want a rockin' high-performance SSD you are forced to make an after market modification. The high-end in the notebook space skews very sharply toward larger systems and toward desktop replacement or gaming laptops. If Apple releases a premium quality netbook size tablet (which seems likely) they would essentially be creating a new premium netbook market. Which is hardly a bad thing for consumers whose needs are currently not being met by the market.