iPod to iPad: what do Steve Jobs and Apple have up their sleeves this autumn?

Not since the feverish few days before the iPhone's debut has the Apple rumour mill turned so urgently. If you believe the hype, the chatter and the speculation, September 9 is T-Day, the day Apple announces its long-awaited, but never confirmed, tablet computer.

According to some, it's a revolutionary product, a device with the power to bring the world to your handbag or manbag and change the shape of portable computing. According to others, it's a disaster - "a train wreck from start to finish" in the words of one well-known pundit.

And yet there's very little evidence to suggest the device even exists. Characteristically, Apple remains silent.

Rumours of a touch-screen Mac can be traced back as far as 2002. Touch-screen tablet PCs (like one half of a laptop - the screen half) were on sale then, but won little fanfare. Niche objects, expensive but hardly more exciting than stylus-operated digital clipboards, they served the medical profession and other industries that worked standing up, but failed to interest either the general consumer or Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

People have been speculating on the speculation about an imaginary productBut the 2007 launch of the iPhone, with its slick touch-screen operating system and giant eco-system of third-party software, changed all that. If Apple made the iPhone just a little bigger, the thinking went, you wouldn't need to carry your laptop computer. If enough commentators speculated that Apple might make a bigger iPhone, perhaps Jobs would get the message.

Finally, after enough people speculated on the subject of the speculation, we've arrived where we are today: arguing about such details as price points, feature sets and shipping dates of an, as yet, entirely imaginary product.

So, let's speculate. Is Apple about to launch a mini-tablet computer?

It's possible. There's certainly a market for a "cheap" Mac. In the last couple of years, netbooks (cheaper, smaller, lower-powered laptop computers) have outsold the rest of the market, and there's a netbook-sized gap in the current Apple line-up.

The iPhone and iPod touch have convinced the sceptical that touch-screen technology can work properly, and that consumers want to consume media ­ film, music, photographs, games, the Internet ­ on the move.

Apple's Safari browser is superior to the competition. Apple's means of distributing music, TV and film dominates the market. So why not add books to the iTunes store, too, and compete head