In response to your blog, I believe it comes down to this:

Apple need to soak up more of the business market and having a slide-out keyboard would allow this to happen fairly easily. (I was surprised that the keyboard was the feature that received the most positive response from people) From Apple’s perspective they would be in an internal tug of war between staying with their pure ‘forward only’ innovation angle, or incorporating old tech for the sake of greater profit/market/opportunity/etc. I don’t think people would hold it against them for too long if they did put in a slide-out keyboard, to be honest. You’re “business” re-branding idea is perfect. I’m sure that once the business sector takes up the “iPhone Business” model Apple would slowly phase out the slide-out keyboard once adoption of the touch keypad would have taken place and, of course, if sales figures between the business model and regular model would signal this phase out to happen also.

If it turns out that touch screens are eventually loved by everyone and that physical keyboards really are a thing of the past, then so be it. If it turns out that, actually, there are those that even after decades of use people still prefer a physical keyboard as opposed to those who prefer touchscreen typing, then this is fine too. But without both to explore in the same device we’ll be left to suffer an eternal divide between people buying blackberries and iphones. What’s ironic here is that Apple would probably garner more people to subscribe to touch screen typing sooner if they were to include a physical keyboard. Weird, huh?

Again, this is a really interesting debate that’s taking place.

Great blog, keep it up.

Last I checked I wasn’t ‘retarded’. That said, I stated clearly in my post that the original ‘Elite’ concept was from Mat (even linked to the source) and that Mr. Diaz whipped up his awesome version in reaction to the original (linked to his as well). Very clear. Also, I’m not sure how I could have copied/pasted an entire article, when all I did was check out the concepts and write about them off the top of my head. My points, my thoughts, my post. I think we can both agree these concepts are fantastic, certainly something to talk about.

Thanks for your comments though, I have added two more links to the source articles, there are now two links going to each, which I’m sure they will appreciate!

If you are going to copy and paste Jesus’ entire article into WordPress and only change a few words, then at least freaking credit the man. (Not that he cares about a little peon like you.)