Good Morning everyone! Today I think I will engage in some armchair predictions of the tech world, just because I have the urge to splurge my thoughts out.

So I have been watching this little fun stuff with the update to OS X that has borked Hackintoshs, seems that support for the Atom chip has been removed from 10.6.2. Now I don’t have a hackintosh, but honestly it has been a big draw to me. It is something that is right up my alley of doing. I love that type of stuff and it would be actually fun for me.

But since I can armchair this one, I think there is actual reason behind this happening. I think Apple is going to release a line of netbook-like and/or tablet systems come January. Now I know people have been talking about this for what a year now? But I think this killing off of the Atom support shows that it is coming. Why?

Intel has a new line of Atoms coming out: http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/intels-next-generation-pineview-atom-cpus-to-be-released-in-late-december-2009119/

Nvidia CEO praising Apple: http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/intels-next-generation-pineview-atom-cpus-to-be-released-in-late-december-2009119/

Current Atom support being killed off: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/11/confirmed-snow-leopard-update-kills-atom-hackintoshes/

This shows it all that we will see a netbook-like system with the new Atoms and Nvidia Ion (or something that is a custom Ion) chipsets. Killing off the Hackintoshs of this subset (since non-atom based hackintoshs are still functional) is going to leave a void in the market that Apple will want to fill with its own creation. Apple doesn’t like competition. We have seen this with its reaction to Mac Clone builders. They are about control, be it for making things simple or be it for them to just “take their ball home.” Making this void now is going to leave people in the place that in the next 6 months they are going to want to upgrade and why not just buy the official Apple product. This seems to be SOP for Apple and those that purchase their equipment.
Now to really fly off in my ideas…. I think we will see a netbook device that will have about a 10 inch touchscreen that will be able to fold flat to the system so it will be able to run in a tablet mode. They will have these approx 1.5 GHz CPUs, 1 gig of ram, no optical, type N wireless, with the option of 3G wireless, 2 usb ports, a webcam and some custom uplink/charging port. The unit will be ultra thin when folded closed. We will see an update to iTunes that will allow the downloading of eBooks into this machine. Really, the eBook market is too big for Apple not to take a bite out of it.

So is my hump day armchair tech reporting.