Now that Arrington has weighed in, I’ll place myself in his rarified company by writing the obligatory blog post about why I think Apple is doing a tablet.

Because I am a loser, I have no access to Arrington’s clandestine sources, so I’ll content myself with doing a plebian version of trying to break down the reasons why it might make sense for Apple to do this.

Why would they do this?

People cry wolf on the Apple tablet thing almost every year:

• 2007
• 2008

Why would 2009 be any different?

Well for starters, netbook sales numbers are getting pretty huge. Apple hasn’t made a netbook yet, but why not? Well one reason is that Tim Cook thinks that netbooks suck. But a better one is that Apple has to know it could just do something a hell of a lot cooler if they made a device with the functionality of a netbook but the form factor of a a giant iPhone.

Why do I think this? Because Apple hasn’t entered the netbook market yet even though they have the expertise to own it. The iTunes Store is a juggernaut engine of adoption, and Apple’s also sitting on some badass multi-touch patents that they’ve hardly begun to make use of yet, not to mention supply chain prowess that is the envy of the industry and the cash/demand to ensure they can get whatever they need from overseas suppliers. I think they’re going to enter the netbook space in a major way, and that when they do, it will be a tablet.

What would it look like?

I’m thinking something like Amazon’s Kindle, but with the capabilities of an iPhone, and most of the look — big, flat tabula rasa touch screen. The size would be really important, because you would want this thing to be able to be a book or a control panel for your home media center, but also have a netbook-like capability set.

It’d probably have to have a better version of OS X on it than the iPhone does — more bells and whistles. This could be why OS X Snow Leopard has support for 3G. (I don’t think that the Air sells enough to be the reason. If that’s why, then they’re going to severely lower the price of that badboy).

What it would do

In general, I’m envisioning an on-the-go “instead of the laptop” option for when you’re travelling light but the iPhone isn’t enough. Here’s a list of the potential use cases that get me excited:

• Touch-screen notebook/sketchpad/eisel (a bigger space for Brushes!)
• E-media reader a la the Kindle
• Home media remote control
• iPod with awesome capacity
• iPhone with magnetically-attached, Ive-designed earpiece (we can dream, right?)

OMG! When can I have it?

Supposedly this fall, but who knows? The intensity of the buzz has been building for awhile. Most people think that an announcement would come at WWDC next month. Let’s hope so — I’d definitely be first in line for this one.

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 today, and I’m a lot more pleased to be writing this than I would’ve thought two years ago. IE 7 was a significant improvement over IE 6’s miserable standards support, but as Ars Technica puts it, it was still a catch-up release, and IE 8 is a genuine attempt to compete with the new crop of browsers that have come up since IE 7 was released:

what really needs to be emphasized here is that IE8 puts Microsoft back in the game. IE7 was a catch-up release, there’s no question about that. However, with IE8, which is bigger leap from IE7 than IE7 was from IE6, Microsoft is pulling out the big guns and offering features which other browsers have yet to adopt. It’s good to see Microsoft fight back with a vengeance, but the company has more competition than ever before, from the likes of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera.

At SxSW interactive last week, the Microsoft panelist in the talk on CSS 3 mentioned that IE 8 is more compliant with Acid2 than any other browser out there. Apparently, Acid 3 support is still pretty crappy, which is kind of annoying since Acid3 support isn’t that great yet in any browser with significant market share. One would assume that support for Acid3 in IE 8 would drive more rapid adoption of the cool stuff you can do with the standards tested by Acid3, but it’s apparently not part of their plans for the browser. As far as I’m concerned, this is yet more BrowserFail from MS – W3C standards should be followed by any browser. If Mozilla, Opera, and Apple (and therefore Google’s Chrome) can see this, why the hell can’t Microsoft?

Still, as someone who has to get cross-browser support going for IE, I’m happy to see the improvements that version 8 brings. And if I were inclined to ever use a Windows PC, I’d probably be pretty excited about this feature:

A Web Slice grabs specific information from a website (like the top stories from Digg or the weather forecast) and puts it in a drop-down menu, eliminating the need to browse to the actual website. “It’s about making it as easy for sites to extend and blur into the browser,” Hachamovitch told Ars. This is a brilliant feature but it is completely lost if developers ignore it.

This certainly sounds more interesting than the hideous RSS reader thing in Safari, and of a similar but more flexible functionality. Good to see MS doing this kind of stuff, but I agree with the assessment from Ars that unless devs support it, it’ll be useless. And given devs’ well-known affinity (sarcasm) for doing IE-specific work, I’m not seeing this being as big as it should be, given the quality of the innovation.

Video from Google — the inventors talk about map/reduce.

Hearing Schneier say this is oddly comforting to me:

While I like the science of quantum cryptography — my undergraduate degree was in physics — I don’t see any commercial value in it. I don’t believe it solves any security problem that needs solving. I don’t believe that it’s worth paying for, and I can’t imagine anyone but a few technophiles buying and deploying it. Systems that use it don’t magically become unbreakable, because the quantum part doesn’t address the weak points of the system.

I guess I’d basically been thinking that quantum crypto would kick off a privacy battle that would make the controversy over Diffie-Hellman look tame.

But I have to ask — does it make me into a conspiracy theorist to think the stuff about quantum computing is just optimism?

Pretty serious stuff, but years away from being practical. I think the best quantum computer today can factor the number 15.

I have a hard time believing that the boys at the NSA don’t have something like this that they just haven’t told anyone about. But maybe that’s just me buying into the mystique of the USA’s premiere spook agency.