One of the most intriguing stories from CES 2014 thus far, at last as far as I am concerned, is the debut of two 12 inch Samsung tablets – Galaxy Tab Pro and Galaxy Note Pro. There have been other vendors that have come up with tablets larger than 10 inches (including some truly gargantuan ones), but Samsung is definitely the most mainstream actor in this product category. One of the main reasons why this might be very telling is because much of Samsung’s consumer electronic strategy revolves around reacting to or preempting Apple’s products. Be it an 8 inch tablet, a smartwatch, or a feature-heavy smartphone, Samsung has been very eager to compete directly with Apple in all the product categories that the Cupertino company enters. Thus, this unveiling of two 12 inch tablets signals that we might expect a similar device from Apple, maybe even some time this year.

More I think about it more I’m inclined to believe that Apple will make this step in the direction of ultra large tablets. MacBook Air, it’s once incredibly advanced laptop, is starting to fall behind compared to both Apple’s “regular” MacBooks, as well as to ultrabooks coming from other vendors. I was surprised that Apple did not boost its screen resolution past year, but if they are planning on phasing it out in favor of a “supertablet,” then boosting MacBook Air would have been almost futile. Apple has also been moving in direction of coalescing iOS and OS X, and it’s highly conceivable that the two OSs will merge within a few more upgrades of each. This seems particularly likely since Apple has moved to 64 bit architecture for its mobile devices last year. Finally, there is the matter of name: iPad Air. Granted, one should not read too much into this, but it’s hard to imagine that Apple didn’t want to invoke some kind of association between two of its devices with this choice.