So let’s assume for a moment that Apple is really going to to a Tablet. Why should they me model­ling it on the iPhone, and not the Mac? If it’s going to be with a 10″ or 12″ dis­play and have at least a half­way decent pro­ces­sor, I think the natu­ral choice would be to go with the Mac as the star­ting point; the Mod­Book shows the pos­si­bi­lity of such a ven­ture. There’s loads of soft­ware avail­able for the Mac as a plat­form as oppo­sed to — pro­bably none that would be run­ning wit­hout modi­fi­ca­tion in the App Store today. So if they want the platt­form to take off quickly, I guess it would be in their inte­rest to have the ready-to-run soft­ware avail­able right away.

If Apple were indeed to offer an App Store for the tablet, it more cer­tainly the not needs to be just one dis­tri­bu­tion chan­nel for the platt­form, not the only fea­si­ble way for deve­l­o­pers to get soft­ware onto the devices.

But maybe Apple will again sur­prise us with an ent­i­rely new take on the topic. They’ve done that before.