Analyst: "MacBook Air has some of the aesthetic qualities of the tablet"

CNET has an incredibly vague analyst quote mentioning that Apple’s tablet resembles the MacBook Air.  Brook Crothers says:

I will make an exception–which I almost never do–and not identify the analyst. He claims to have seen a prototype of the Apple tablet and would prefer not to be identified. (Yeah, I know, more than a few analysts claim they have seen the furtive device. But I will go out on a limb and say I trust him. He claims the MacBook Air has some of the aesthetic qualities of the tablet.)

Crothers goes on to explain that the technology industry is waiting with bated breath on the Apple Tablet so that it can turn out the duplicates. He points to the iPhone changing the smartphone industry and the MacBook Air creating a market for ultra thin notebooks.

Crothers’ secret analyst says Apple will be selling the tablet at over $500 while the industry copies it and sells tablets for under $200.  Sounds like you can take the PC industry, cut prices in half and that is the tablet industry.  Crothers speculates that the other tablets won’t only come in one platform like the Wintel PC market.  He thinks (and we agree here) that the tablet market will be much more spread out, with ARM chips and Google’s Chrome/Android OS’s taking a big role.

There is nothing entirely new here but we’re left wondering how the tablet will resemble the MacBook Air?  Sure it will be thin and light.  Hopefully, it runs a capable version of Mac OSX.  After that, it becomes a little baffling.  MacBook Pros seem like a much more modern design for the tablets – especially since glass is better at capacitive touch screen navigation.  The Air’s bezel is aluminum like MacBook Pros of yore (last year).

Crothers ends by saying that in a year everyone who is a techie will have a tablet in their "inner circle of gadgets".  We hope to. Will you?