I have been thinking about the new device that may be introduced at Macworld. Let's try to bring a few strands of thought together.

First, when browsing with my laptop, I often want to pinch or unpinch something to make it bigger, as though I was using my iPhone. This means that technology is pretty powerful and appealing, and I'm sure Steve is very aware of this. Accordingly, the new device needs to have some kind of touch screen ability.

At the same time, the onscreeen keyboard is definitely iPhone's weak link. The main reason we might want a bigger device is so we can type. And yet all tablet designs I have seen that feature keyboards are incredibly awkward with their requirement that you flip the screen and hide the keyboard to use the tablet. When I used a Toshiba tablet, I felt that mechanism was flimsy and felt bad. I know that's something Steve would not tolerate.

Many people have asked why the new Bluetooth keyboard is so small. It's the size of a laptop keyboard and has a very compromised layout for a computer keyboard. Perhaps this keyboard has been designed as an accessory for a keyboardless tablet (and maybe even an iPhone). The new Apple tablet, then, would be a pure tablet with Bluetooth, and it would be designed to fit together with the Bluetooth keyboard.

This would enable a tablet that looked like a giant iPhone, and so would be completely optimized as a tablet. You could then optionally use the keyboard with it for heavy typing, or use an iPhone-style onscreen keyboard if you didn't want to drag the keyboard along with you.

Sometimes you want to do heavy keyboarding and then it would be nice to have the display at an angle. I think Apple or third parties could design a stand that would do this. You could then use the bluetooth keyboard and mouse on a table.

So what about use on an airplane? First, with the limited space you have in a tourist class cabin, it might be better to just use the device as a tablet most of the time. Whenever I try to use my PowerBook on a plane, it's difficult to do whenever the seat in front of me is reclined. If I could put my Bluetooth keyboard on my lap, have a small stand that tilted the tablet towards me, and used the tablet itself as a mouse, that might actually be a much better form factor for planes than our existing laptop designs.

This is the kind of design that I think Apple could come up with that would be radical enough to be revolutionary and practical enough to work in everyday life.

We'll know whether I'm right in about a day as I write this ...

D

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