But will it run vi? And g++?

Stick a 3g broadbeam connection in, charge for the connection via itunes, and connect us to bbc iplayer for streaming TV

Thanks for ruining Christmas, pal!

I just hope that the Easter Bunny doesn't her about this - he'd be ever so mad!

Would the average buyer care?

More importantly, if it's an iPod touch on steroids, will it do flash and cut'n'paste?

This is almost as exciting as the news about the Amiga laptop!

(OMG! New Year and I'm having a 90's flashback already)

I used to have one when I was about 20, it was khaki green and called the Apple Newton, it was OK, but lacked useful software, so I sold it for £200 once the novelty had worn off.

for the colour Newton!

Given the layout of the virtual keyboard, it could be the first legitimate use for the C trigraphs since the 1970s!

so based on apples general pricing policy, that'll cost around £500....

...3G modem! you wish! it took them a year to figure out that phones designed around the internet usually work better on a fast internet connection

it'll probably be £200 option if anything

Stop spreading these lies REG... Santa is real :P

...and his Jobsness has realised the Newton wasn't such a bad product after all.

Are these the reporters who have also spent the last 25 years speculating on which day Apple would go out of business?

The Apple strategy is to come out with a brilliant flagship product that puts all others to shame without question. Other brilliant products follow for the "halo effect." Everyone stands in line to buy new Apple products as they laugh at how bad competitors are. Apple promotes and promotes and promotes these products even as competitors make large gains. Years pass and the Apple product line becomes embarrassing old relics headed for the landfill. Then Apple releases another brilliant new product...

While customers are growing frustrated with current product flaws, I don't think anyone is throwing them away yet. If Apple was to release a new product now, the market might not be as large as they'd hope. Worse yet, releasing updated products now might be seen as admitting that some of their recent products are defective rather than obsolete.

BTW - The Reg's Steve icons are starting to look fat.

"it could be the first legitimate use for the C trigraphs"

Geeze ... Thanks a lot for THAT reminder ... I thought trigraphs and their bretheren digraphs were safely locked away in the mental file drawer marked "college homework", never to be opened again. Now I'm going to have nightmares about porting C compilers for weeks ...

Sometimes it sucks to be semi-eidetic ...

How many of these have we seen ?

With the current BeJaysusPhone interface Apple could have a good stab at it but looking at the long list of (admirable) failures would they want to try ?

Maybe His Jobsness has half an eye on the current laptot fad, it could work if connectivity is sorted.

Larger device than an iPhone would make tw*t spotting a lot easier as you walk by your local St*rb*cks tho :)

Mines the asbestos lined one.

...I can confirm, removing all doubt and speculation, that since 2000 the Apple corporation has been researching and developing a product that it plans to bring to market in early-to-mid 2009. As your speculative article implies, this new product will be adapting and hybridizing existing successful products to fill a market niche that is, as you also say, currently absent of any credible contenders.

iSanta, built on the world renowned self-important judgmentalism of Steve Jobs and the generous affability of Steve Wozniak will be hitting the market sometime in 2009 - with production ramping up to beat the pre-christmas tech rush. R&D costs of earlier prototypes encapsulating the business acumen of Woz and the moral centre of Jobs have been successfully amortised by placing them in revenue generating positions within the banking and finance industries, as well as several seats in the US Congress.

Of course, if asked to confirm this on the record, I shall denounce the whole notion as absurd and may even deny any association with the Apple corporation. Seasoned Apple followers and iBloggers will recognise this as irrefutable evidence that the rumours I have just spread are completely and one hundred percent true.

Graham Lockley's description of Apple-addicted Starbucks-housed coffee-loving design freaks describes me to a tee.

Maybe I need to make a New Year's resolution to Think Different.

I'd guess that Apple probably has quite a few prototypes developed, run a round of tests and then do what they decide to do.

Maybe notion of a prototype does not necessarily mean that a fully fledged commercial product is in the (immediate) pipeline?

I dunno, looks a little fishy (in that it's too thin) but here they are:

http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg223/user_mcuser/Mac_Tablet1.jpg

http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg223/user_mcuser/Mac_Tablet2.jpg

odd that it seems to have a brand name written on the side, can;t quite see it but it could be "samsung" or something!

Just build a new Newton, add some audio, video and networking capability, and off you go.

Nobody seems to be buying them. If you want a powerful PDA then you don't want it to take a minute or two to boot.

Sure, there's standby or hibernation but the fact is Windows or Linux are just too fiddly to be used like a PDA on steroids.

The problem with tablet is the size and the lack of a keyboard. You need a decent size in order to write on it well, but not too big to be bulky. The old Newton 2x00 is about perfect in this regard, and if you compare you will see that all those UMPCs nobody buys thanks to their shoddy OS and "battery life" are about the same dimensions. Any bigger and I would rather have a convertible tabletbook which hopefully is not too ergo-challenged in tablet-mode. You will need a keyboard no matter what the guys in marketing think, and if the machine is 14" it might well be permanently attached.

I would *love* to see Apple come up with a UMPC one can actually work on. Or maybe OQO can get their act together and put out a machine with a touchscreen one could then put OS X on, although running a deskop OS on a pen-operated machine is deep into Bad Idea Land. At that size, it is all about ergonomics. Apple is pretty spot-on with those on their mobile consumption machines, now give me something that admits people need to work every now and again. Apple has all the Newton patents in the drawer, they just need to undust it, add a few 2009 features, and they are go. The size and weight of a pocketbook, the power of a full system. Worked for me for years, would love to refresh any day.

That would be the only way for a fanboy to have a 9 incher in their pants then.

"odd that it seems to have a brand name written on the side, can;t quite see it but it could be "samsung" or something!"

You have better eyes than I, then, because I zoomed way-the-foo in and all I got was a rectangular blur that, in picture 2 COULD be the Apple logo with the word "Apple" and in pic 1 looks more like a fingerprint scanner than anything else. Could be most anything, really.

FWIW...

Dont use the phrase 'coffee-loving' in the same breath as St*rb*cks ! For gods sake, they dont even serve Lavazza !!

El Reg's first coffee based flame war, bring it on !!!

:)

<Im not religious about anything except coffee>

"Im not religious about anything except coffee"

If you don't roast your own, you're a coffee neophyte.

Friends don't let friends buy pre-roasted, much less pre-brewed coffee.

>Friends don't let friends buy pre-roasted, much less pre-brewed coffee.

A neophyte bows before a master

:)

"A neophyte bows before a master"

No. I'm not a master. Rather, I'm a student in search of perfection. Someday, I hope to learn to brew the perfect cup. Until then ... onwards & upwards :-)

...that one thing that has put me off going Mac for my day-to-day requirements has been the lack of the tablet form. My last two laptops have been Toshiba Tablet PCs and as I blogged before, that was one of the main deciding factors when spending my dosh.

The only thing to do with tablets is to take two with water when your head hurts from searching for the buttons and keys which you can't find ...... shyt, you have to switch it on .... I know, but the ON/OFF switch is virtual and only appears AFTER it is up and running.

I think I'll stick with my MacBookPro ---- if I need to work with a pen, I have a Bic (4 pence each) and a note book --- if I need to sketch INTO the computer, I do it on paper and simply scan it !

Anyway, the thing understands English, so I can speak and tell it what to do --- leaving my hands free to play with myself in front of the sexiest thing ever to come out of a cardboard box !

It wouldn't come a day too soon: a tablet running OSX with about a 9x12-inch "live" drawing area that'd let me sketch right into Photoshop or Illustrator, or jot notes straight into a text editor, perhaps even with an HDTV receiver built in. Yeah, I know; they had a crack at it once with the Newton, but handwriting recognition sucked, and it was too goddamn' small.

I can't believe how El Reg goes on and on bitching about how they don't have their flying cars yet, when what would be truly cool would be something like the "Newspad" from Kubrick's '2001'.

From the very first time I saw an astronaut watching himself being interviewed on the BBC on one while eating his microwaved space breakfast in '2001', I thought, "Hot damn', I _want_ one of _those_!"

C'mon, Apple; get with the goddamn' program. Where's my friggin' Newspad?