Musings on a Mactablet

I think what we are going to see late this year is a cross between a MID (mobile internet device) and a netbook.

There's a lot of Netbooks out there from almost all the manufacturers and there was a flurry of MID activity earlier this year.

Netbook: 5-7inch screens, some touch screens some not, some convertible tablet style, some not, some run linux some windows. Mostly they are for email, web surfing, Skype and light duties with word etc. Light, portable.
MID: 3-5 inch screens, tiny, light, good battery life, mainly for web surfing but also email and probably light document duties.

Now Apple is probably not going to do a full tablet because really the touch things that happen on Mac's is mostly designers with a Wacom and they're going to want to use a big screen with it.

The iPhone also takes care of the web surfing and connectivity which sort of flows over into a MID. But not fully. You're not going to want to do any big document work on an iPhone. You're not really gong to want to do a lot of email. So people with an iPhone will have a laptop for the bigger stuff. But if Apple comes out with a slate format 7-9 inch screen unit with all the bells of multi-touch that's a different story. Big enough for email but not too big. Big enough for web work, but still small enough to carry everywhere. It won't take out the iPhone, won't compete with the big laptops but will certainly attract the audience that is going for the netbooks in droves. I don't think Apple will do a netbook because they've got the MB Air for funk factor, ultrlight, etc and the market is saturated with netbooks. As a point of differnce a slate factor MID/Netbook hybrid would do a sterling job.

My 2.0c