The Important Part: Jason D. O’Grady on ZDNet’s Apple Core blog acknowledges he’s spreading a rumor today:
“A little birdy tells me that Apple will announce a 12 or 13-inch tablet in the fall of this year. Most likely in the September or October time frame. It will run the full Mac OS X and have a slot loading SuperDrive, an “iPhone-type†GPS chip and an Intel Core Duo processor, presumably Intel’s Atom.
Of course, long time readers of RexBlog know that since 2006, that particular rumor is called Rumor #3.
The Take-Away: For over two decades, the concept of a product like this has tickled the fancy of Apple enthusiasts. Observation over the years of Steve Jobs’ obsession with elegant industrial design has led me to assume Apple will never have a “tablet” Mac (it would require too many hinges and buttons, things Jobs hates). However, I’ve long felt there could be a spot in the market for an Apple device the size of an eBook reader but with all the function of a computer in an elegant, button and keyboard-less form. It took 20 years for the technology to catch up with the vision, but we’re closing in on the time where all of the pieces can come together. Evenso, I think some of these rumors are “wishful thinking” on the part of people like me, however, as in: “If we wish hard enough…” One last observation: My use of a MacBook Air leads me to dismiss any rumor that includes a “superdrive” as part of the feature-set of such a device. I purchased the external one when I got my MacBook Air and have used it maybe twice in the past several months.
Sidenote: The Apple Core post includes a mock-up of such a product that appeared last August on the ArtilleryUnit blog (right). If I’d have known about their clever one last November, I would have skipped my five-minute PhotoShop hack (left) of what I called the iPod TouchBook (left).
The Important Part: In the current issue of BusinessWeek (and online), Heather Green and Stephen Baker have written a great overview of where “social media” (not just blogs, but all the conversational media and social networking tools and platforms out there) are today as it relates to business. Not, as over-reported in the technology blogosphere, about the business of social media. And not about the tools and features and investment opportunities and anything else gee-whiz that’s going on. This BusinessWeek story is about how all these activities and connections and conversations that are taking place online are changing the way business is conducted.
The Take-Away: The article may not be eye-opening to a crowd who spends all day reading tech-blogs and camping-out on Twitter, but it’s a great article to forward to a “C-Level” person at your company or organization who you think could benefit from a high level view of what is transpiring — from a “media brand” they know.
The Less Important Rambling: Over the past three years, I’ve gotten to know BusinessWeek writers (and bloggers) Stephen Baker and Heather Green pretty well. I haven’t actually met them face-to-face, but we’ve shared conversations about Heather’s wedding, Stephen’s book and a myriad of other “important” and trivial matters. We’re “friends” on all those online networking things you’ve ever heard of (and many you probably haven’t if you’re not a Web 2.0 wonk). Because of that, it may seem weird, but I actually know more about what Stephen and Heather are up to than many acquaintances — and friends — I know “off line.”
For example, because we follow each other via Twitter and Facebook, I knew they recently worked on updating a story from May, 2005 with information and insight that has emerged during the past three years. In that second link, they’ve literally annotated the first article with contemporary statistics and knowledge. That’s a brilliantly creative reporting technique that I’ve never seen before as it uses visual cues from the Word document “change tracking” feature so readers can easily see where the new information has been inserted.
If it weren’t Saturday morning of a three-day weekend, I might be tempted to keep rambling, but I have much less important things that are beckoning me at the moment.
