Macbook, Netbook or iPhone?

A new rumor has been making its rounds on the blogosphere recently. John Markoff from New York Times has indicated that there could be a new Apple Netbook/Macbook Touch/iPhone 3.0 making its way to consumers pretty soon. Going by the looks in the picture, it definitely looks real tempting.

Apparently an unidentified Apple device was detected for the first time in the traffic logs of some web sites. Like with the original iPhone—which was spotted online in web traffic blogs—I won't be surprised if this was real. Other Apple computers were detected online first as well, although some of them—like multiprocessor Macs running SETI or other distributed computing tasks—were never released. Unlike Markoff, however, I believe that Steve was completely honest when he said "we don’t know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk", arguing that the company mission was to give more at the same price points, not less features for less money.

For all we know, it could be a hackintosh netbook (a "normal" netbook that runs a hacked version of Mac OS). But it definitely would be interesting to see if Apple actually churns out this beauty in the near future.