According to RBC Capital analyst Mike Abramsky, anyway.
The long-rumoured Apple tablet device may not have a focus on e-books and e-newspapers after all, judging by comments made by company execs at an event hosted by RBC Capital.
RBC's Mike Abramsky has penned an analyst note about comments made by Apple's iTunes supremo Eddy Cue, CFO Peter Oppenheimer and Mac marketing boss David Moody at the event:
"After music, video content is expected to be the next 'exploding' opportunity, but requires overcoming industry rights dysfunctionality, competing with subsidies (cable box, video), and developing the right consumer 'offer'. Apple TV, while still a 'hobby', is well positioned to benefit from evolving market dynamics. Apple was less enthusiastic about the online book/newspaper market, given unattractive industry structure."
This may be a classic piece of misdirection, given the speculation in recent weeks that Apple is looking to tie up deals with newspaper and magazine publishers to supply content for its tablet, which is expected to launch early next year.
Meanwhile, book publishers seem pretty keen on iPhone, judging by the mushrooming number of apps available in the App Store's Books category.
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Talking of iPhone, the Apple execs also talked to RBC about what they see as its key advantages over Google's Android platform, which is increasingly being talked of as the main competitive threat to Apple's handsets.
According to Abramsky:
"Vertical integration and the iTunes ecosystem are Apple's secret weapons against the Google (GOOG) challenge. Developers, they claim, prefer Apple's single-platform model over Android's multiple hardware configurations."
Although undoubtedly true, money talks - if developers start to believe they can make decent money on Android despite its fragmentation, they'll start porting their apps and games to Google's platform in greater numbers.
