Editorial

Posted on 6 Oct 2009 at 15:59

 

Gallery

The biggest sign of a tablet Mac is Apple's refusal to comment...

I'd love to be at Apple right now. Not Apple UK or Europe: the biggie. Apple CA, sat in the boardroom, reading the blogs and the news sites, and the broadsheet chatter. The tablet is a-coming, everyone says, even the analysts, but only one man knows for sure if or when it will come. That man is Steve Jobs.

Not that I want to be Jobs, you understand. If you were a part of the small band of people that surround the man and are working on the tablet, you'd be reading the extraordinary coverage this yet-to-be-confirmed product is receiving and rubbing your hands. And if you worked in HR or accounts, you'd be wondering how many marketers you could lay off. Who needs them, after all, when the product has already sold itself?

This issue, we've taken a look at the extraordinary hype surrounding the tablet. We've dug through the blogged pixels and the press-printed words, and picked out the most compelling supporting evidence. The result, as I'm sure you'll agree, adds up to one thing: there is most certainly a tablet in the works... somewhere.

The thing that has swung it for me though, isn't the success of the iPhone and iPod touch pointing to a gaping hole in the line-up for a slightly larger form factor. Neither is it the fact that Apple has kept the MacBook name alive while pretty much killing off the product in its current guise (polycarbonate casings are so 2008). No - it's the silence. The most Apple has said on the subject, supposedly, is an email from Jobs warning a newspaper that it had got some of its facts wrong. Some of them - not all of them.

How different this is from his comments several years ago in which he denied that Apple was even looking at the tablet space.

Now, it could be that the company has simply chosen not to speak about unannounced products - its usual course of action - but there comes a time when a company has a duty to its shareholders and the market at large to be honest and stem such rumours before they get completely out of hand. It could argue that it doesn't need to - after all, it isn't Apple itself that's feeding the mill - but when there's a chance those stories could materially affect the company's share price, its duty is at least moral and ethical, if not legal.

Plus, of course, if it was to be discovered that the tablet was nothing but vapourware, that price could fall like the proverbial stone. Managing expectation to manage a slow decline would be far better for everyone concerned.

Where the Apple tablet is concerned, then, no (official) news most certainly is good news.

Author: Nik Rawlinson