According to a report in the Korea Times, Apple has placed an order for 12.9-inch high-resolution panels with a South Korean display manufacturer
Couldn't be for a 12.9 inch Retina Macbook Air running on an ARM chip could it?!
Apple may be planning to debut a new, larger iPad early next year, if murmurings from the fruity firm's Asian supply-chain partners are to be believed. According to a report in the Korea Times, Apple has placed an order for 12.9-inch high-resolution panels with a South Korean display manufacturer, with the goal of releasing a …
Wow. It's been several years already and there are still people who have yet to learn that an iOS/Android platform is not the same animal as a full OS. And no, making a screen bigger is no substitute. Perhaps it will take a few more years for reality to sink in.
Apple are good at one thing it is letting other companies take the first steps and then slipstreaming them with a better more refined product - iPod, iPhone, -iPad
Where can they go from here? The iWatch won't happen as the market is still in it's infancy. I think they will take the idea of a hybrid device like Microsoft, HP and Asus have all tried and blow them out of the water again. A Retina Macbook Air form factor with a 12.9 inch touch screen running on an ARM chip with incredible battery life that can detach to become an iPad would sell like hotcakes.
You say that iOS is not the same animal as a full OS and I totally agree. Apple could easily compile OS X for ARM and I've no doubt that it is already running on ARM in one of their R&D labs somewhere. They have added lots of features to OS X to make it more iOS like and stuff like the launchpad gives OS X the touch screen interface it would need to make this useful on a tablet.
If this is indeed a tablet at that size I have to ask, how is a 12.9 inch tablet useful? Isn't the point of a tablet lightness and portability? I mean to a graphic designer or a photographer/journalist doing on the fly editing maybe a tablet that size would be nice.
I can also see a use case that directly impacts me, as a Military Intelligence unit working with quickly updating digital maps or images coming off a satellite would probably find it useful as making everyone who works in the IMINT, GEOINT, and occasionally SIGINT/COMINT cells crowd around a PC monitor gets old quick (especially if you've had people in the field for a few days reporting back to the TOC and pointing things out on the map or in images, and they haven't showered yet. Makes you want to shove your earpro up your nose or make you thankful you have a cold), but everything I can think of are all pretty limited use cases, and they're all business, so that probably wouldn't justify building hundreds of thousands of these things, so I take this rumor with a grain of salt.
The 12.9 inch ARM laptop idea that Larry posited here sounds more likely to me. But Apple does strange and seemingly counter-intuitive things sometimes, so who knows.
@FrankAlphaXII
This is the device that gets me to buy a tablet. Better would be an Android device. The market segment I'm in isn't the "sit on the couch and play Angry Birds" while watching sitcoms market. It's not the market that leaves a tablet laying around in case the urge to watch some YouTube arises.
What I want is a tablet the size of a hardcover book (though thinner if possible) that I can throw PDFs of real books on and use the in full-colour at full-size. Specifically RPG gaming but I could see doing this with textbooks as highly applicable as well. I'd enjoy having my entire library of RPG books stuffed into this device. Four or five shelves of reference material at my fingertips - in its original format. Not just a text rip, not a black & white e-book format, not HTML, and not some reconstituted app. The books. So I can treat one tablet just like whichever of a hundred or so books I want at the moment.
Corrections needed, done for you.
'At Apple the boss says “WHAT MARK-UP” and it only gets made if there is a huge profit per item.'
As for me, I am STILL wondering what is the point/use for anybody's tablet.
Ah yes because Apple are the only company in the world who are interested in mark ups and making a huge profit per item. I wish all companies would be as ethical and pious as Samsung who just break even on all their devices that they sell and who are only in business out of the kindness of their heart rather than making profits for their shareholders....
Absolutely.
There were a rumours a few months back about Apple merging the 11.6 and 13 inch MacbookAir into something around 12.5 inch, thinner with a high resolution screen.
That could just be it.
I for one is waiting for this.
There are so many Mba lookalike these days that Apple needs to reset the bar and go thinner.
Oh great a 12" computer screen that has very little control over where to put icons, and can only display one window.
Sounds like the dumb terminals I used in the 80s, except with colour.
Still, it's Apple, it will sell (so long as they remember to make them shiny, and not colourful and plastic)