iFugly

Popular Mechanics is frantically turning the crank on the Apple rumor mill, isn’t it? In the annual guessing-game leading up to the Macworld Expo, the publication speculates that CEO Steve Jobs will announce a breakthrough laptop-tablet device at this year’s keynote, one quite a bit different from the gigantism-afflicted iPhone tablets imagined by others.

” … Any Apple tablet would have to be, first and foremost, a laptop–not an über-iPhone,” writes Popular Mechanics’ Glenn Derene. “… [It should] have a full keyboard, and since the keyboard generally dictates the size of the screen, I’d propose a 13-in. widescreen. … It could, and should, be 2.5 pounds or less. To achieve that, the tablet should offload heavy components such as the optical drive, making do with, say, a 32 GB solid-state drive rather than a hard-disk drive. … That would let it run a full Leopard OS while delivering long battery life. … [And it] should ship with a desktop dock. … Much more than a simple port replicator, this dock would house a DVD burner (maybe even an HD-DVD/Blu-ray combo drive) and a 500 GB 2.5-in. hard-disk drive that could automatically sync with and back up the SSD onboard the MacBook Plus. The dock would bump up performance with a graphics card that could take over from the MacBook Plus’s motherboard GPU, plus some extra RAM and instructions to the CPU to kick up its clock speed.”

An imaginative little bit of fantasy, this, and one that makes for great reading. That said, if the Apple Industrial Design Group were ever to propose a device like the one pictured above to CEO Steve Jobs, he’d probably hurl them one-by-one from the roof of Apple HQ.