In the absence of fact comes speculation. The whole world seems to want an Apple Tablet / iTablet / Macbook Touch (call it what you will). While the latest rumour suggests we won’t be seeing any kind of Apple Tablet before 2010, designers have been running off their own ideas for the mythical gadget for a long while now.

Some designers have passed off their work real, while others have been happy to admit they’re just dreaming. Now we’ve collected some of the best designs out there for you to compare.

Read on to decide which one you would run out and buy…

MacBook Touch

This rendering is the classic tablet design – a thin slab of plastic taking design cues from the Mac Pro and the iMac. It looks like it runs a touch optimised version of OSX and can run full apps like Garage Band and iTunes [Gizmodo, November 2007]

Design 8/10

Chance of the real tablet being anything like this 3/10

MacBook Nano

A fold-up dual touch screen running a modified version of OSX, complete with Dashboard widgets and an onscreen keyboard. As a nice as the form factor is, it’s would hideously impractical. [PMP Today, January 2008]

Design 5/10

Chance of the real tablet being anything like this 1/10

MacBook Tablet

Firmly in ‘Fake’ territory, the designer here has gone so far as to include an specs and a price. There’s no way they could sell a tablet at that price. Well, they could, but only Stephen Fry and Leo Laporte would buy one. This Tablet has an ‘old PowerBook’ look about it, which extends to the OS – it’s a completely unaltered version of OSX. [InternetGecko, July 2007]

Design 4/10

Chance of the real tablet being anything like this 5/10

The Tablet-in-an-iMac

This is just ridiculous, but you have to love the designer for thinking ‘outside the box’ and ‘inside the iMac’ [via Webdseigner Kochi, July 2008].

Design 6/10

Chance of the real tablet being anything like this 0/10

Apple Tablet

Here’s an old-school design from five years ago. It shows just how long we’ve been waiting for an Apple Tablet, and just how much our expectations have changed in that time. I mean, a disc drive? Not a chance these days – it wouldn’t be needed now we’re drowning in wi-fi. Not to mention the fact a disc drive would run the battery down in no time. [The Apple Collection, October 2004]

Design 7/10

Chance of the real tablet being anything like this 2/10

iPhone Pro

This is far more what we’d expect a 2009/2010 Apple Tablet to look like. It’s basically a stretched out iPhone but running OSX. Spot-on looks-wise, but the actual Tablet won’t run full-blown OSX. It’s far more likely to be a modified iPhone OS. [Artillery Unit, August 2007]

Design 8/10

Chance of the real tablet being anything like this 6/10

And the nicest of all…

A simple large-form iPod Touch and nothing more – this idea is probably closest to what we’ll see when a Tablet finally arrives. Let’s face it, anything more would be a huge battery hog. At this size it could also be used as a controller for full-size Macs as well as being great for browsing media and web surfing on the sofa. [Gizmodo, August 2009]

Design 9/10

Chance of the real tablet being anything like this 9/10

An honourable mention goes to this design – not a tablet but beautiful all the same – give that man a job, Apple!

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