Did Kevin Rose spill the beans on the Apple tablet, or lack thereof?

Mon, Oct 19, 2009

News, Rumors

Digg co-founder Kevin Rose’s track record regarding Apple rumors is spotty.  Sometimes he’s way off base and sometimes he’s right on the money (i.e re: cut, copy, and paste on the iPhone).  That being the case, take this with a huge grain of salt.  This past weekend, the digg founder was out enjoying a few libations when he ran into a female Apple employee who supposedly spilled the beats, sorta, to Rose about Apple’s upcoming tablet.. only she said that it wasn’t a tablet really.  Rose proceeded to post a series of tweets about this conversation, as evidenced below.

Now, a number of reasons to doubt this. One, info regarding the tablet, or whatever it is, is undoubtedly highly compartmentalized information even within Apple, so being an Apple employee, in and of itself, wouldn’t create a reason to believe this supposed informant.  But, if we assume that this Apple employee did have first-hand knowledge of an upcoming Apple product, do you really think that she would be the type to go out on the town and drink to the point where she’d be revealing company secrets?  So yeah, taken all together, this seems highly suspect.

But, and to get your conspiratorial juices flowing, last week a rumor surfaced suggesting that the Apple tablet is indeed real, but that its form factor and functionality is completely different from what has been rumored thus far – a fact which seems to corroborate the drunk female’s inside tip to Kevin Rose.  Now that I think about it, perhaps this female tipster works on an internal marketing team over at Apple? – a position which might explain her head up knowledge.

Much how the iPhone was fundamentally different from what the rumor sites were predicting prior to its launch, this mythical Apple “tablet” that appears to be under heavy development may also be completely different from what we traditionally think of as a “tablet.”

  Share

,

1 Comments For This Post

  1. HD Boy Says:

    Maybe this “tablet” (which I now think could use a resurrected name — ‘iBook’) will make use of Apple’s take on the built-in slide out keyboard that the company patented a couple of years ago, just before the release of the first iPhone. At the time, people thought that it might prove to be an indicator of the first iPhone’s form factor, though others thought it might have been a feint, released to mislead cellular competitors away from what became the real (touchscreen) form factor….

eXTReMe Tracker