A blast from the past, Dec 15, 2007:
“MacBook Touch: If you have used an iPhone or iPod Touch you might understand the enormous potential of this device type – I think Apple understands it now even if it caught them by surprise. Multi-touch is going to be huge and pervasive in the apple lineup – it is just getting started. This will be a 10-12″ tablet form factor PC whose appearance will be similar to the iPod Touch (only bigger). So it will have a glass front with black trim (with a single ‘Home’ button) and a matte aluminum posterior. back of the unit will Input will be through multi-touch (but it will have host USB for attaching a keyboard). The interface will be more like the iPod than Leopard. It will not have any moving parts, instead relying on 32 or 64 GB of flash memory. Like an iPod Touch, there will be zero start up time. I expect the CPU will be an Intel ARM or low power X86 chip (more likely the latter as Intel attempts to displace ARM in the lower power device space). The clock-speed will be 1.0-1.2 GHz to keep temps down and avoid the use of active cooling. Battery life will be 6-8 hours. Wireless will be 802.11x, Bluetooth and possible a data service from AT&T designed just for this device.
- 10-12″ LED LCD featuring Multi-touch – personally I think the 10″ would be good, but a 12″ would fit a hole in Apple’s portable lineup better
- 32 or 64 GB of Flash memory
- Glass and brushed aluminum construction
- OSX ‘light’ the embedded version of the Mac OS rather than full Leopard
- 1 – 1.2 GHz CPU – Intel x86 or ARM core
- Long battery life, 6-8 hours
- 802.11abgn, Bluetooth (including stereo audio profile), Built-in HSDPA (optional)
- MagSafe adapter, and possibly a nice minimalistic dock (think bikker iPod dock)
MacBook Touch: It will have iWork applications embedded (or they will be available for purchase at launch). Applications will be bought and installed through the iTunes store. When plugged into a Mac or Windows PC a large portion of memory will be available for copying files over. Apple’s iSync and .Mac services would really flesh this product out.”
