A laughably fake “iSlate development document” has been “leaked” to PhoneArena, possibly through a drainage shunt trephined through the cranium of some wishful thinking prankster.
The first clue that the document is phony is the fact that, two days later, Apple’s lawyers aren’t Q-tipping the gelatinous remains of PhoneArena’s site owners out from between their toes. But there’s other reasons to be skeptical.
First of all, the document claims that the Tablet will run OS X 10.7, codenamed “Clouded Leopard.” Ha, whatever. Not only is that name ridiculous, but we know that if the Apple Tablet is announced at the end of January that we can expect a launch by no later than June: Apple needs to give App Store developers time to tablet-ready their apps, but they can’t wait so long that the competition has time to catch up. More over, Snow Leopard was just released in August 2009, and the first developer build of its successor is rumored to be released at WWDC in June.
The bottom line: the tablet is going to come out well before the release of the next version of OS X. And it’s probably going to run something closer to the iPhone OS anyway, although I personally expect to see those operating systems as distinct entities begin to converge more drastically with the release of the Tablet.
But there’s still plenty of stupid to concern ourselves with. According to PhoneArena’s leaked spec sheet, the iSlate will run a 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. No, it jolly well won’t. The Core 2 Duo architecture is just too power-hungry for a tablet: Apple is going to go ARM, given their acquisition of ARM chip designer PA Semi in early 2008. And even if they don’t, why would Apple pick the last generation of Intel chips for their tablet, when the new Intel Arrendale mobile chips offer 10-40% performance increases while slurping less power than their predecessors?
Look, we could go through this one by one and dissect the stupid (a 4200RPM hard drive in an accelerometer device? lolwut?)but basically, someone imagined the Apple Tablet as a new touchscreen MacBook with the screen reversed. That’s not what the Tablet is going to be.
