According to a note sent by Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner to clients on Wednesday morning, the California-based tech giant is gearing up to launch the tablet, which comes with a 10.1-inch LCD display using the iPhone’s LTPS LCD technology, between March and April 2010. An estimated of 1-1.5 million units will be sold at an average price of US$1,000.
If you want get one of those, you’d have start saving up your pennies. But seriously, no one will burn a hole in his/her pocket to purchase this wildly overpriced gadget, except for those crazy Apple fanboys. I believe the folks at Apple plan to squeeze every ounce of profit margin from early adopters, and then reduce the price after a few generations of Apple Tablet. I think people will still purchase the tablet, even though it will carry a price tag two times higher than its arch-rival JooJoo (formerly known as Crunchpad), because of the Apple brand.
While we await the official announcement from Apple, why not check out these really cool and exceptionally beautiful Apple Tablet concepts below! Well, there could be a possibility that Steve Jobs has hired a few designers of the following concepts to assist team with the design of the Apple Tablet.
Aluminum Apple Tablet Concept:
This Apple tablet concept is designed by Japanese photographer Isamu Sanad. It comes with an aluminum casing and a black border around the multi-touch glass display. It seems like the Apple tablet will run on Mac OSX system (according to Isamu) and not the iPhone OS, as seen from the screenshots below, which show that the Apple tablet is running desktop like iPhoto, iTunes and Apple TV.
The MacBook Touch, which comes in a 5 x 7.25 inch screen, is designed by Japanese Apple geek Isamu Sanad. It has a similar styling to the iPod touch and iPhone, and looks a little different from his aluminum Apple tablet concept. Interestingly, the concept shows a mixture of both desktop OS X and the cut-down version of the platform used on the iPod touch.
Sean Mulvihill imagines a Apple Mac tablet that features a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Processor, 512MB – 1GB of RAM, 64GB flash memory, Bluetooth capability, WiFi, and a cut down version of OS X Snow Leopard to fit the device. However, this well-designed Apple tablet concept isn’t portable as speculated by analysts.
Designed by Edwin Tofslie, his fantasy has Multi Touch and works well as a thumb keyboard when turned vertically. It has minimal inputs outputs since it is has Wireless USB, blue tooth and WiFi, and the Dock Systems will accomplish the heavier stuff. It also has a bigger hard drive, some sort of DVD player/burner, inputs for your USB and Firewire devices. The whole keyboard part itself is used as a large multitouch track pad. Since the keys need to be depressed when hit, you can do lighter touches as you move across the whole thing. The sleek gadget runs OS X with modified Touch commands.
This MacBook Touch concept, designed by Logan Lape, was the winner of a design contest on Gizmodo. He illustrates its portability and usability (a touchscreen piano in Garageband, and an impressive eBook Reader).
Jon Doe, a biochemistry student, has come up with a a beautiful concept of an Apple tablet named “MacSlate”. Besides having a a multi touch interface, it also has some other cool features.
Designed by Chris Messina, the Apple iPad comes with a sleek design, a multi-touch keyboard, and runs on the iPhone OS. The device will basically be a glorified iPhone, just 2.5x the size. Chris claims his gadget will retail at $699 for 32GB and $899 for 64GB. At least it’s much cheaper than the rumored Apple Tablet, which will come with a hefty price tag of $1,000, according to analysts.
Foldable MacBook Touch Concept:
This wonderful foldable MacBook Touch concept is designed by Tommaso Gecchelin. It features Flexible OLED technology, provide the rich color and resolution density needed for a smaller screen without being a power hog and resists damage by its malleable nature. The thinnest screens now are barely 8mm thick and can fold like a piece of paper. When in notebook mode, one half of the screen is converted to a touch screen keyboard and trackpad.
Maverick imagines how a Mac tablet / ultra mobile / sub-notebook would look like. His MacPad is rather unique as compared to other Apple tablet designs because it comes with a QWETRY keyboard, and users can slide it up to punch in letters or numbers.
This is absolutely insane! The design is pretty good, but having 81 (9 x 9) apps on the home screen is something that I dislike. Designed by Vern Hart, the iPhone Tablet looks like an enlarged version of the current iPhone.
