Cool your jets. That’s the advice from analysts on a flurry of conjecture about whether Apple is stealthily testing online some mix of iPhone and MacBook.
What sparked the talk was a brief mention in the New York Times that an unnamed search engine found in its logs an unannounced Apple device with a display size between an iPhone and a MacBook.
Lending further weight to the suggestion were comments by CEO Steve Jobs that the Cupertino, Calif. company “had some pretty interesting” ideas for the netbook or mini-notebook market.
Although some see such an Apple device timed to appear alongside other netbooks slated for the holiday buying period, one analyst believes it is too soon.
“We believe it will be a 2010 event,” Piper Jaffray analyst Andrew Murphy told Cult of Mac.
Murphy believes Apple is developing a tablet device larger than an iPhone, but much work is still needed.
“They would likely need to re-write either the iPhone OS or the Mac OS from the ground up for a tablet interface,” he said. Apple may release such tablet technology as part of a follow-up to the Snow Leopard version of Mac OSX, Murphy wrote in an e-mail.
If Apple is testing a tablet or a netbook, chances are it’ll cost over $500, given comments by Jobs.
“We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that,” the Apple CEO said Tuesday when asked about low-cost notebooks.
Despite the protestations, ThinkEquity analyst Vijay Rakesh thinks Apple may not have a choice. In September, Rakesh said netbook sales were denting demand for Apple notebooks.
