Reading Tea Leaves, Snow Leopard Casts a Tablet Shaped Shadow?

A lot of people what an Apple netbook without going the Hackintosh route (installing Mac OS X on a suiteable conventional netbook). There was some speculation prior to this month’s Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) that Apple might introduce a iPhone OS based device in a netbook tablet form factor. Despite the lack of any hint from Apple that a netbook type device is in the design queue, there’s still speculation (hope?) that we may see one soon (before the holiday buying season). The latest speculation comes from CNET’s Erica ogg who took a look at the upcoming (September) Mac OS X Snow Leopard update…

Snow Leopard features hint at Apple tablet

She looked at a number of Snow Leopard features that indicates support for a touch screen tablet type device: Expose in Dock, Stacks, Quicktime X, Freehand drawing and Safari 4.

Would a Mac OS X based netbook type device be more expensive than an iPhone OS based one? That seems likely given the larger system memory and flash (or hard disk) storage required. Could Apple find success with a netbook type device priced way about $500 (like $1000 to $1500)? I’m thinking “No.” But, then, I also thought Apple had a loser on its hands when it priced the original 5GB iPod at $399 way back in October 2001.

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