In July 2000 Apple invited me to New York, where it was participating in the Macworld show. There used to be two each year, one in San Francisco, one in New York - now there's just one, and soon there'll be none. There, Steve Jobs - remember him? - unveiled his "one more thing", which turned out to be a computer shaped like a cube, eight inches on each side. Impressive. Expensive too.
"So who do you expect to buy this?" I asked David Moody, then Apple's head of desktop systems. He insisted it wasn't just some flight of fancy: "We had customers coming to us and saying that they wanted a class of product that nobody was offering. They wanted to have professional power but didn't want the baggage of the slots and big box on their desk." You may know the rest of the story. The Cube was iced a year later. Sure, some people wanted its power but they also wanted to, but couldn't, add expansion cards and lots of memory. Those who liked its looks and didn't mind the lack of expansibility found the price tag - $1,799 in the US, £1,149 in the UK - too steep.
I think I'm correct in saying that Apple has never since discontinued a product because of insufficient sales. It's killed things off - the eMac, the iPod mini, the 160GB iPod - but not because they were left shamefaced on the shelf. That tells us Apple is a rigorously focused company nowadays. Which is why I don't think it's going to announce either a tablet or a netbook at next week's WWDC conference - or any time.
The tablet is the easier prediction. Ignore the people who say, "If Apple made a tablet I'd buy one in a heartbeat!" They're a niche, just like those who led Apple astray over the Cube. And, despite its image, Apple does not build for niches. It aims for the biggest market it can - within the limits it sets itself - making premium products. It would be happy with 100% of the top 5% most expensive computer purchases, because it would make tons of profit. (It settles for less, obviously.)
Tablet computers are the nichest of niche products. Great for doctors and, um, architects? Hopeless for the average person who needs a rapid way to interact with, and input data to, web pages, email, spreadsheets and documents.
But, you say, Apple sells the iPhone, which is like a small tablet! It's got an onscreen touch keyboard. Just make it bigger, and there's your tablet! Nope. The iPhone (and iPod Touch) are successes in the category Apple has aimed them at - highly portable internet devices. They aren't intended to replace a computer at times when you'd use a computer; they're serving a different need.
The tablet computer is generally envisaged as a replacement for a laptop or desktop. Why, though? When would you pull out your tablet and start working with that, rather than attaching a keyboard to it - ie, use a laptop? Alternatively, why would you use a tablet if you could use an iPhone? It's a solution looking for a problem.
Which then leads us on to the netbook question. Why wouldn't Apple launch a netbook? Besides Tim Cook's repudiation of the idea, which doesn't necessarily count for anything - if the sun were one of Apple's products it would deny it was going to rise until dawn, or possibly slightly after - there's that "market" mathematics. Netbooks are designed down to a price; they're after price-conscious consumers. Apple isn't. It doesn't want 100% of the bottom 5% of the market. But that's what the netbook market is. Don't expect that either next week.
But there will be a new iPhone to go with the updated iPhone OS, of that I'm sure. And I think that's going to be a very interesting entrant to the market.