Whee! Here we go again!

Wow. I let my attention drift for a few days and what happens? The tablet rumours return with a vengeance. With the Macworld keynote only a few days away, the ol' rumoursphere (TM) is buzzing.

This time, however, the Mac Tablet rumours seem to fall into two camps. There are those who think that Apple are going to announce a Tablet, and there are those who are speculating about this third-party "ModBook" thing.

I'll start with the ModBook because, firstly, it's more than likely that it is the reason for all of those Apple Tablet rumours (these sticks should be labelled better to stop people grabbing the wrong ends), and secondly, it has actually been announced, if only as a teaser. Hey, I'm a sucker for anything draped with red velvet. The Register's take on this is that it's a modded MacBook (erm, as the name may suggest...) in the style of that iBook tablet from a couple of years ago. Having spent some time over the last couple of weeks reassembling my dead G3 iBook, I can understand where these guys could be coming from. Looking at the pieces, I was thinking how easy it would be to cut a hole in the iBook's lid, reverse the screen and hey presto! you're half way to tablet-ness. If OWC were able to deliver, and it didn't look like numbers were going to be limited, I might consider getting one of these. As it is, I probably won't be getting my hopes up. We'll just have to wait to the 9th to see what we shall see.

As with most "Apple might..." rumours, the rush to explain exactly why Apple won't build a tablet has begun in earnest. Of particular interest are articles by Steven Frank, and David Sobotta (formally Apple's Federal Sales Manager, whatever one of those is) in The Guardian (both found via Daring Fireball).

Sobotta quotes his Steveness himself, answering a request from some US Medical industry types for an Apple Tablet. Of the concerns he raises, the WiFi and screen issues have pretty-much been sorted in the intervening years (this is said to have happened way back in 2002). This just leaves the liability issue, which I don't see as being insurmountable. After all, PC/Windows tablets are sold into this market. Any Mac Tablets would be based on similar (hell, who am I trying to kid: identical) technology and hardware, so things like interference with other equipment shouldn't be an issue. And it's not like an Apple Tablet is going to be directly running any of the really important equipment, it's just going to be used for taking notes and accessing patient records and other housekeeping tasks. And as I'm sure we're all tired of repeating, if anything OS X is more reliable than the Windows alternative.

(Let me just drift off on a reminiscence-fuled tangent. I seem to remember the disclaimer in the front of an old Motorola processor manual - for the 68030, if I remember correctly - stating that the CPU was not designed for use in, among other things, medical equipment. I'm sure a similar thing holds even today for mainstream Intel chips. I guess it's a trade-off between loosing a small-ish industrial sector against a whole world of potential lawsuits.)

Now, Frank's argument basically boils down to his opinion that, even though a Tablet would be brilliant and he would definitely buy half a dozen himself, no one else would so Apple isn't going to build one because there's no market for them. Okay, his argument is a little more developed than that but I think I've captured the basics. Okay, I'm not going to argue that Apple is going to launch a Tablet, but I'm going to suggest that they won't be launching one for completely different reasons. So tablet-form PCs currently only account for 1% of the laptop market (due to raise to 5% by 2009). What percentage of laptop sales do Apple machines account for? I know, it's a stupid argument. But since when has Apple been about following industry trends? I kinda thought they were about setting them? ("What? An expensive, feature-light MP3 player? It's going to take more than great industrial design and thoroughly thought-out yet effortless connectivity to compete in this market!")

I don't want to been seen as throwing random insults at any of the many people who have commented on the possibility of a Mac Tablet, by they all seem to be suffering from "I'm Special" syndrome. Symptoms include making statements along the lines of, "I would camp out overnight in a blizzard to be first in line for a Mac Tablet, but I honestly can't imagine anyone else would be even remotely interested in one." I think that this is a really big mistake. The Mac has always been the computer for "the rest of us", but I'm not quite sure people realise how large a cohort "the rest of us" actually is.

Let me give you an example of why I think the demand will be there. A couple of years ago, the BBC broadcast Dickens in America, a documentary in which Miriam Margolis travelled around the eastern part of the US in the footsteps of Dan Brown Charles Dickens. The fact that it was interesting stuff aside, what struck me was that for part of the voice-over we were shown a reflective end-of-day Miriam sat writing her journal on a tablet PC. To my eternal shame I can't remember the make, but that isn't important. Neither is the fact that her longhand appeared to be being stored as graphical pages rather than being interpreted. Was is important is that here was someone who we can assume to be either uncomfortable with or uninterested in computers using one simply as a tool in a way which was natural to them. Whatever you thought on the merits of a £1500 sketchpad, here we have an example of the kind of demographic we like to pride ourselves on Apple traditionally targeting.

(Wow. Sorry, digressing again, but I've just discovered that Miriam Margolis also did most of the female voices for the English language dud of Monkey. Kudos.)

Whether or (most likely) not Apple announces a Mac Tablet next week, it's obvious from the reaction in the press that there is a considerable amount of interest in the format. And I'm always glad to find out that it's not just me.