Now that the waves around the iPhone have mostly died down, and we’re in a “silent period” between announcements, some further musings.

My earlier ideas about OS X in other products and a second-generation “tablet” device have percolated into the punditosphere. The trigger seems to have been the recent surge in larger or faster solid-state memory devices, as well as shipment of the first hybrid flash/disk drive. See, for instance, Jason D. O’Grady commenting about another analyst’s write-up:

There are numerous reasons why a diskless MacBook (or nanoBook) is the next logical progression of the notebook computer…

What’s interesting about the Reuters piece is that [it] claims that the nanoBook would run the stripped down, multi-touch version of Mac OS X that will ship with iPhone as opposed to the full-blown version…

In an included poll, however, 76% of voters said they’d want such a sub-notebook to run the full version of Mac OS X, and only 10% claim to accept with OS X (Lite). Others are skeptical of wider use of flash memory, even for larger iPods:

There is one brutally limiting factor to flash, though: cost. Flash is almost ten times more expensive than hard-disk memory. Although significant adoption of flash over the last 12 months has seen prices drop enormously, it’s still too costly to buy in the quantity needed for video iPods. Apple has a good relationship with its flash manufacturers though, and may secure a helpful price reduction it can pass on to consumers. But will that be enough to justify vanquishing the hard disk completely?

Still, I agree that prices are falling fast and that such a device may well be pre-announced at WWDC in June for shipment before the end of 2007. On the other hand, when so many financial analysts agree that such a device is in the works, it makes me suspect that they must be wrong…

Speaking of WWDC, only some radical holdouts (and a few financial analysts) still believe in an end-of-March launch of Leopard. I can’t say much about it because of NDAs; but to put Leopard on the market by the end of this month – meaning that, because of manufacturing and shipping times, it would be have to be ready about today – is impossible. Yes, some of the aforementioned radicals say that Apple has secret advanced builds in their labs and all the seed versions they sent out since last were just a cover. Hah. I’ll believe that when I see it; maybe not even then.