iSlate?

I agree - I think it would be great if turned out to be a fully-fledged Mac running a version of OS X. Basically a mobile mac. I'd love it.

The world already has what you're describing, too. The reason you may not have noticed is because it failed to survive in the market.

Microsoft has been trying to wish and hope the Windows-based equivalent of exactly that into the market since at least 2001. It went precisely nowhere. It failed for a number of reasons, most relating to the fact that it was nothing but a plain old laptop that you had to use a pen with instead of a mouse, and it ran stock Windows XP (or, nowadays, Vista or Vista-Point-One), which was designed specifically for use with a mouse and keyboard. Even as recently as CES, MS was demoing tablets running Windows 6.1 behind touchscreens, complete with mouse-only UI that you were supposed to use with your fingers. And then scratching their heads wondering why nobody cared.

The whole point of the tablet form factor is that you're interacting with the screen directly, not through a proxy like a mouse. This requires a substantial rethink of how many things on-screen are interacted with, what they should look like, how big they should be, how they should be arranged, etc. Turns out, Apple already went through this whole rigamarole — that's how they came up with the iPhone's UI, where nearly every single smartphone that came before it had been using a shrunken desktop UI. That tells me that even if this upcoming tablet has far more powerful apps than the iPhone (and it absolutely should), it'll probably be closer to an iPhone than a Mac in how you interact with it.

Just imagine the monitor in front of you now is a capacitive touchscreen; if you were to try opening a Finder window, dragging it by the titlebar without hitting either the toolbar buttons or desktop, selecting a few files and moving them to a different folder (both of which your finger would likely cover up), then hitting the exact right "traffic light" to close the window, it would be incredibly frustrating. More so if you had to go through that for everything. To compensate for the size of your fingers, most UI elements would have to be scaled so big that it would crowd out much of the content you're trying to work with. It just doesn't make sense for your fingers like it did with a finely manoeuvrable mouse pointer.

I think any apprehension about the "limitations" of the iPhone OS being used on a tablet is probably premature. First off, they would never just plop the exact same OS onto a completely different device; they've had the opportunity to optimize it for their own hardware designs (duh). Secondly, I certainly think they'd be aware of how skull-crushingly lame and pointless it would be to have the exact same class of mobile software running on the tablet as on the iPhone, and have probably made it possible to create something much closer to desktop-class apps (within the finger-friendly UI paradigm), perhaps making some examples of their own to show off. (iWork Express, anyone?) Lastly, they've been around to witness the rise and fall of Microsoft's tablet concept, too — and they're known for walking into existing markets (i.e. MP3 players, smartphones) where nobody seems to be "getting it", and showing everyone how to do it correctly. They wouldn't take the risk of breaking into a new sector of the computing market with the sole goal of repeating Microsoft's old mistake.

All of the above = IMHO. :)

P.S. Asking for Adobe apps (I'm assuming you mean CS4-calibre stuff) on what may essentially be Apple's answer to the netbook sounds like a recipe for disappointment. It can't, and won't, be everything to everyone. That's what you have a full-fledged computer for.

P.P.S. Holy crap...that seriously didn't sound as long in my head. Sorry, ha!

How about if it was named iHate instead of iSlate?

wow Bob Dylan at the speakers! xD he said Steve's favorite xD

the grid could do with being tightened up a lot. I'm sure there must be a preference pane that could alter this though.

want.

more of a large ipod touch. it's missing the same things the touch is missing, except one flavor adds 3G.

my response is "meh." there's definitely a market out there for it, but i own a laptop and an iphone and i don't see that this has enough functionality to move me from my laptop and iphone. i don't desperately need the extra screen real estate on my iphone to plunk down $600+ and another $15-30/mo for it.

That got a laugh out of me :) Awesome