An Apple tablet is on the way according to unreliable, totally anonymous sources

It seems that ever since Microsoft announced the Tablet PC, speculation on Apple's own version of the touch-screen slate have surfaced with monotonous regularity.

First it was that Steve Jobs would unveil a Mac Tablet at Macworld in San Francisco the week before Bill Gates officially launched the first Windows-powered tablets at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Every year after that, the Apple tablet never failed to get a run on the Macworld rumour mill. Sometimes it popped up at any point on the calendar, with insider reports from one of the several Taiwanese companies responsible for manufacturing Apple's notebook line over the years. Someone had seen a hand-tooled prototype, someone had heard about a contract signed or a massive order placed for small LCD panels.

The iTablet: one of many Photoshop mock-ups which have appeared in ther past whenever the Apple tablet rumours start running

There were even Loch Ness-style sightings of Apple employees seen wandering around the Cupertino campus, tapping a stylus on a large flat panel which looked like a screen that'd come loose from a notebook.

Almost without fail, a few months out from the January kick-off of Macworld, the whisper begin anew. As Macworld gets closer the gossip on what Jobs will reveal increases in volume and accuracy, and the tablet tattle-tales are replaced by more realistic predictions - of new iPods, notebooks and desktops, revamped software, added online services. (Although, as always, there are plenty of exceptions as enthusiasts' wishlists are woven into the conversation.)

And it's an easy way to ramp up traffic to your Web site. Questions over a tablet splits the Mac community down the middle, but a neatly packaged ‘word on the street' report gets them all clicking, linking and commenting. Apple never comments on unannounced product, of course, so they won't even issue a denial that would slap down the rumour (many claim that Apple enjoys and almost indulges these canards because they distract from other more accurate reports and cloud the overall conversation).

And no-one ever expects to see a source actually named in these ‘exclusive' reports, because everyone knows that the threat of legal action of a company losing a lucrative Apple manufacturing contract would keep lips locked tight. So it's always spies and insiders who have the good oil.

As a result, the first Web site to post a new spin on the old yarn gets enough traffic to blow he doors off the server room.

The good news? It's almost certain that that one year, in one shape or another, these rumours will prove true. (Which will then permit every site which ran a scuttlebut story to boast how clever they are because they predicted it, even if that was in fact three years ago and nothing more than a wild punt.)

The latest rumour to hit the Web looks like yet another reheat. It names Asus, one of the giant Taiwanese manufacturers which already builds some Apple kit - as have most members of Taiwan's A-list ODM/OEM set. It says that plans to build an Apple tablet are definitely under way, but it'll be an entirely new design rather than one of Asus' off-the-rack models. Well, that's what you'd expect: Apple designs it own kit, even if it has someone else build it, and there's no way that Jobs would want a rebadged tablet that some Windows tablet maker has used or, worse, passed over.

The rumour then offers the escape clause that this could just be a prototype, which means anything could happen or nothing could happen and they're still be in the clear. And it cites an anonymous but well-placed source inside the company, so we know it must be true.

The goss even attempts to inject a dollop of veritas by tipping that the tablet will be based on Intel processors, run a modified version of Leopard and include the multi-touch CoverFlow technology seen in the iPhone and iPod Touch. That's a cold read of which John Edwards would be proud, unless you truly believe that Apple would unveil a radical and hotly-awaited tablet based on Tiger and a Power PC, and deliberately leave out some of its coolest touch-based technology. Yeah, we can see that happening...

So are we down on the notion of Apple's own UMPC, an Ultra Mac Portable Computer? Not at all. Done right, it'll be a killer device. And Apple, by and large, Do Things Right. We've lived with with iPhones and Nokia tablets, played with concept devices from Intel and products from Microsoft's own UMPC partners. Should Jobs ever unveil an Apple tablet at Macworld, this writer will likely break his "Never buy version one" rule and rush to join the queue in San Francisco's Apple store.

And when you consider events of recent years, and how the cards are slowly becoming stacked in Apple's favour, there are plenty of reasons why the Mac table rumour has legs.

Built-in ink: OS X now includes the Inkwell handwriting recognition technology developed from the original Newton, and seen here in a preference panel from OS X 10.2 Jaguar

There was the inclusion of Apple's ‘Inkwell' handwriting recognition technology, formerly at the heart of the Newton, into OS X 10.2 Jaguar. It's still there today, in Leopard, although you won't see it until you plug in a digitiser. And it has enabled Axiotron to create the ModBook tablet, which is a highly customised MacBook which swaps the keyboard for a touch-sensitive screen using Wacom's digitiser (and yours from just US$2,300. Inkwell has the look of a legal pad, with a semi-transparent sheet of lined paper, and translates scrawl in English, French, and German.

Then came the famous patent for an Apple touch device filed in March 2004, and granted i

'The iPatent': Apple's patent application from 2004-2005 cited tablet PCs and included this illustration of a touchscreen device with a gestural interface

n May 2005. The original filing simply called it an " electronic device" but specifically named HP's Compaq Tablet PC by way of comparison. Accompanying illustrations clearly showed a handheld device with a touch screen, and while the technology itself was the forerunner of the iPhone and iPod Touch, the pictures were of a far larger device in a very different form factor.

We also have the stripped-back version of OS X that's inside the iPhone. It's been severely pruned, of course, but it illustrates the modularity of OS X. There's no reason to think that the components Apple removed, to squeeze OS X down into a sub-500MB flash memory footprint, can't be judiciously added to meet the needs of a Mac tablet which has to to more than an iPhone but still didn't require full desktop functionality. One thing is for certain: Apple didn't make the extraordinary investment in time and money to revamp OS X just for the sake of a single product.

Just one more thing: this is Axiotron's ModBook slate, but it could show what's in store for Macworld 2008 (or 2009, or 2010...)

Finally there is Intel's own work on its ultra-mobile platform. Right now it's at a roughshod version 1.0, with the UM2007 ‘McCaslin' platform using a single-core Pentium M ULV processor (rebranded as the ‘Stealey' A100/A110). That all changes in the middle of 2008, when the shift to the UM2008 ‘Menlow' platform sees the debut of the all-new Silverthorne ultra-mobile CPU based on 45nm Penryn technology but built from the ground up for ultra-mobile devices. Intel claims that Silverthorne and its Poulsbo chipset will reduce thermals, average power consumption and package size all by a factor of four, compared to the 65nm McCaslin line.

So will we see a Mac table at Macworld - either as a tantalising and attention-grabbing preview of what's to come, as Jobs did with the iPhone, or a finished product, perhaps the ultimate jaw-dropping ‘one more thing'? To tell the truth, we probably won't know until Jobs' takes the stage on that crisp San Fransicso morning of Tuesday January 15th next year. But because APCmag.com will be reporting from Macworld, you'll know as soon as we do.