In light of a recent insightful discussion with this character, I thought it worth posting some thoughtful speculation on the alleged forthcoming tablet from Apple. Their penchant for upsetting the…ehrm…apple cart with disruptive products is at this point legendary—the merest buzz of speculation around what may or may not be released at the next Apple event is a market force of its own. The much-ballyhooed (well, ballyhooed by customers, not so much by Apple) tablet is second only to the iPhone for buzz and as usual the punters are lined up, panting over what miracles it may contain.

Far be it from me to try to predict whether Apple will release a tablet—those sorts of secrets are so masterfully kept that most governments would do well to take lessons—but I can at least make a fair assessment of what it might be like.

First of all, Apple is not—I repeat—NOT a technology innovator. In its history, Apple has very rarely verging on never invented new technology. Instead, Apple’s strength is in packing the most promising incumbent and emerging technologies in a well-designed device that leverages those technologies toward a highly integrated experience. Their innovation is in the story that ties the product into their broader company vision, not the feature list. But the feature list is so perfectly reflective of and tied to the story that the products steal the show. As they should.

So what we can speculate on, thanks in part to the imminently defunct netbook movement, is what palette of technologies are at Apple’s disposal and which ones they might pick based on the story they intend to tell.

With the excision of “Computer” from their name, Apple’s brand story changed from “human-centered computing” to simply “human-centered technology.” What Microsoft failed to grasp in their last “I’m a PC” campaign is that Apple’s message isn’t that its users are computers, but that its users’ computers are akin to humans. NO one wants to BE a computer, you see, but the idea of having a computer that you can relate to like a friend (assuming your friend is a 20-something slacker in comfortable clothes and not John Hodgman who, in the end, was the far more likable character. But I digress) makes for a compelling, enriching experience. Every Apple product broadcasts and reinforces the human-centered technology story by offering a simple, yet rich, accessible, integrated experience. Please argue about this on your own time—I’m writing about generalities gleaned from their perceived market value, not about Apple fanboi-dom.

The tablet, then, should be no different. One of the more effective ways Apple tells their story is with a purchasing model so simple that it is quickly evident to one’s grandmother which computer she should buy. She does not need to search through dozens of models with obtuse names and specifications; she can quickly drill down to a single choice in any category and price range in a matter of minutes.

As such, each product occupies a unique market position intended to satisfy a single customer group. The MacBook is an affordable mid-power laptop, the MacBook Pro offers advanced features for power users. The iMac is a one-stop solution for most home users, while the Mac Pro at over $3k is targeted toward either the rich or the performance-hungry, and so on. Similarly, the iPod Shuffle offers simplicity and compactness at a very low price, the Nano has a screen and a camera, the Classic has vast amounts of storage and the iPod Touch…well. This one is interesting.

Nearly every person I know who owns an iPod Touch also, not coincidentally, owns an iPhone. Except for two people, one whose phone contract hasn’t run out, and the other, who needs Verizon for their rural coverage, all these customers bought a Touch first, then upgraded to the iPhone. At the outset, the Touch seems to be a me-too product for those who don’t want to tangle with AT&Ts contracts and service. And so it may have been. By removing the camera, Touch customers get the handheld computing experience of the iPhone without the attached strings. But they don’t get it all—only the higher-paying iPhone customers get all the benefits. Fair enough, but the fascinating side effect of buying a Touch is that once you experience the convenience of the product you realize how nice it would be if your phone worked as well as the Touch did. Buying the iPhone becomes inexorable.

Ultimately, the Touch is an outlier compared to the iPhone. It serves to attract a segment of customers that would otherwise not buy an Apple product, i.e. those who want an iPhone but don’t want the contract. In no case does it detract from iPhone sales, since its one unique benefit is storage capacity, though that hardly compares to having a camera and a phone.

Let’s move forward a year or two on the basis of three assumptions: 1) AT&T no longer has exclusivity with the Apple. 2) Some very high percentage of all technology users have some kind of cell phone. 3) The iPod Touch’s development and features run roughly parallel to the iPhone. Given these assumptions, why would anyone choose not to have an iPhone instead of the Touch? Having a phone is a foregone conclusion, so it’s just simpler to put it all into one device at the benefit of convenience, reduced clutter and cost.

Now the Touch starts to look redundant, adding confusion to the story rather than opportunity. So the Touch needs to go. Or change. Indeed.

I need to digress yet again and bring another piece of the Apple story into play. Apple doesn’t typically make business machines, or rather they don’t expressly target business users with the same message that, say, most PC companies do. They offer more generalized products that have intrinsic benefits to business users, as well as artists, designers, families, and so on. The Macbook Air is a prime example of such a product, incorporating many of the trappings of the business notebook paradigm without being overly specialized toward business users specifically. The likelihood that Apple will suddenly begin to target this market segment with any significant focus seems inconsistent with their overall story and history.

What apple does make, specifically and historically, are products that integrate seamlessly with their multimedia juggernaut, iTunes. The slow upward ratcheting of media-centric features in all of their products is evidence that Apple has found a reliable way to generate revenue on the basis of media consumption. A tablet, then, with a large, high-resolution display and wireless connectivity seems like a perfect way to enhance this experience over the incumbent champion, the iPhone. Furthermore, given Apple’s tendency to choose proven, or at least existing technology, we’re not likely to see unprecedented speed or memory performance in their new tablet, compared to other netbooks or tablets already on the market. Given the approximate size and volume of a tablet-sized device, we could expect to see several movies’ worth of battery life, with enough memory to hold a reasonable library of audio and video and processing power to play it.

But it won’t be a netbook, so I can’t fathom how they’d make it run desktop apps.

Apple is on record disparaging the current state of netbook technology as too slow and underpowered to be appealing. That hasn’t changed significantly, and it’s unreasonable to expect that the lucrative developer community currently producing iPhone apps would cotton to yet another format change and start producing apps specifically for a tablet. Well, they could. iTunes is a cash cow for some fraction of developers, but it’s also a huge investment for Apple to support. Adding yet another variable seems unnecessarily risky for minimal profit, at least at first.

What it would be foolish NOT to do is run iPhone apps, somehow (and I mean I just don’t know what they’d look like or do on the tablet at this point, but leaving them out would severely limit the tablet’s value compared to the iPhone), have a rich multitouch interface, play movies, books, and music, and allow customers to access content on demand.

It won’t have a hardware keyboard, since the iPhone training wheels have been paying off so well. It won’t have an e-paper screen, since color and resolution are essential to the iTunes experience. It will have speakers for shared listening and viewing. It will offer access to the “cloud” of data services like iTunes, email and the web. It will be a middle price range, less than a laptop but more than an iPod Touch, say, $500-700. It will be beautiful, desirable and it will work seamlessly with all other Apple products.

And it will be the future of the iPod Touch.