InfoTimes's October sounds like the right month to Gottheil. "That's in the right time frame if they want to sell a lot before the end of the year," he said, referring to the holiday selling season that starts the following month.

But if Apple is thinking of selling something without a keyboard, Gottheil thinks Apple's off its rocker. "A keyboard is fairly important to this," he argued. "Maybe not included with it, but one has to be able to connect one to it. Maybe Apple even sells it separately."

Gottheil also took issue with the idea that this would be a challenger to the far-cheaper netbooks now powered by Windows, and which Google has in its sights with . "Think of this not as a PC, but as a device, as an appliance that can do the things netbooks do, like checking e-mail and browsing the Web. But you don't compare it to a netbook."

It's not the screen size -- at 9.7-in., Apple's would be identical to the screen in Amazon's Kindle DX, the second-generation e-reader -- that defines what Gottheil sees as category separate from netbooks. Instead, it's how Apple will encircle the device with its own ecosystem wall, as it has with the iPhone.

"I think this will use something more like the iPhone operating system than the Mac OS [on a notebook]," Gottheil said. "and it will have something like the [iPhone's] App Store." The latter, he speculated, is important to Apple not so much to make money -- it currently takes a 30% cut of all App Store revenue -- but because of the control it gives the company over what goes on an $800 "netbook."