Adam Banks
As rumours of a mind-numbingly groovy new Mac product hit fever pitch, is Apple poised to unveil more than one tablet computer?
I never fully believed the Apple Tablet was real until I heard these words on my iPhone: ‘It’s [name withheld], I work for Apple and I can confirm that, yes… I’ve read the rumour websites too. We’re all really excited and just waiting for Steve to tell us to start making it.’
Some commentators believe the tablet is the natural successor to the Newton MessagePad. So it’ll arrive five years late, do less than everyone thought and cost a fortune, and the only thing it’ll be remembered for is that Doonesbury took the piss out of it.
Publisher Condé Nast has already announced it’s developing digital magazines for the device, despite not knowing what it is. The company is also said to be looking at a machine created by a woman in Oregon that harnesses the power of crystals to telepathically energise the user’s retinal cells, enabling them to visualise any magazine that’s in the creative director’s head and psychokinetically order and pay for the upmarket cosmetics gushingly over-hyped in its grooming section, without anyone having to get paid to write it. So far, only 827 other publishers have signed up.
Rumours suggest there could be two versions of the tablet, one bigger than the other, or, according to conflicting accounts, smaller. The model with an OLED screen will cost more, while the education edition will have less memory; the variant with greater battery capacity will be the only one with a webcam, and none of the Norwegians play chess. Complete this matrix.
Information exclusively revealed to this column, by a source known only as Ketel One, now indicates there will in fact be several versions of the tablet:
1 – The iTarget Criticism of the iPhone has focused on its closed platform, with handsets available only on selected networks and software pre-vetted through the App Store. Responding to this, Apple will offer the tablet in a special ‘ready broken’ version. Costing just ?2500 without a contract, the iTarget will be stripped of all security restrictions, and Apple will reach out to developers by making available a free API. Known as ‘Coco’, after the sinister clown, this will enable anyone with a basic grasp of Russian to create their own compatible viruses, worms and Trojans. Each iTablet will come pre-installed with a pirated copy of the Eminem track Be Careful What You Wish For.
2 – The Twablet Designed specifically for displaying Twitter feeds, this model introduces the new ‘super-portrait’ format, 16in high by 3in wide. A number of time-saving functions are supported, including auto-scroll, which constantly moves the display downwards at a fixed rate slightly faster than you can read, and auto-gripe, which creates a new post every four hours moaning about the native retweet beta.
3 – The Niblet Furthering Apple’s attempts to look vaguely green while making billions of dollars from manufacturing vast quantities of short-lived, practically unrepairable devices out of rare and unsustainable toxic materials, the Niblet is to be crafted entirely out of corn husks from US mega-farms. Since automated machinery has yet to be produced for this innovative material, assembly will be outsourced to workshops subcontracted from a well known recession-hit Californian fashion company.
Vijay Singh, 12, commented: ‘It is most wonderful news. With this job I will be able to buy clothes for my sister. Not my employer’s clothes, obviously, as the chambray bib front collarless shirt costs more than I make in a month, but anyway she has no desire to look like she has raided the wardrobe trailer of late-1980s baby boomer drama Thirtysomething. And perhaps we will find some corn kernels that have been accidentally left behind. Truly I do not understand why Western liberals are so angsty about consumer capitalism. This is the best day since my late mother got her generously remunerated position at the chemical plant we no longer speak of.’
4 – The iTablet Succeeding the iPod nano as Apple’s smallest device, this is an actual tablet, which, when swallowed, induces the feeling that the user has just seen a real live prototype of an amazing new Apple touchscreen computer. Although the hallucination lacks detail, resembling a blurry scaled-up iPhone, the subject goes round telling all their friends how they’ll definitely buy one if it’s under £800, showing no awareness of the fact that you can already get a MacBook for that with a bigger screen, a hard disk and a keyboard that you can do actual work on.
No evidence could be found to support allegations that the iTablet has already been secretly tested in the general population.
