Why Apple Needs A MacBook nano And What It Should Be Like
Thursday, February 12, 2009
by Charles W. Moore
Having just purchased a unibody MacBook, I’ve given Apple a vote of confidence I guess, but I still have to wonder if I’m being sucked into the famous Steve Jobs reality distortion field when I look at what I could have got in PC hardware for half as much money or even less, and what I didn’t get, notwithstanding paying Apple’s premium price. Okay, I saved a couple hundred dollars by ordering an Apple Certified Refurbished unit instead of buying off-the-shelf new, but still.....
The Mac book is undeniably seductive. It’s beautiful, feels like it’s extremely well built, and I don’t doubt that it will grow on me even more than with familiarity. I’m a kind of guy who tends to like stuff more the longer I use it, which is why my clothes closet and dresser have more than a few inhabitants dating back to the ‘70s, and my truck and car are ‘94 and ‘90 models respectively.
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I even take a certain psychological comfort in buying a refurbished unit instead of new, I’ve never brought a brand-new automobile, even though I’ve owned more than 50 of them - the newest being three years old at the time. That first dent or ding would be a killer. Fortunately, my wife shares this automotive philosophy - we are harmoniously low-end automobile consumers, and while I have bought several new computers over the years, I’m most comfortable with them after the new wears off, so to speak -- hopefully in the form of patina rather than trauma or malfunction. The thing is that both Apple Certified Refurbished laptops I’ve purchased as well as a couple of iPods, have all arrived looking indistinguishable from new, without so much as a scratch or a blemish, so that aspect is sort of a wash.
However, I don’t think I can imagine ever buying a used or refurbished cheap, small, laptop -- AKA “netbook.” The price of entry new ones is just too friendly. But what really blows me away about netbooks, at least some of the newer, nicer ones, is that you get so much for our money, especially in terms of connectivity. While certainly the low and models, (the low end of the low end?) can be pretty bare - bones and spartan, some of the newer, higher - priced (by PC standards) models are becoming very attractive, in looks, features, and specification as well as price.
Take for example of the new Asus 3.2 pound Eee 1000HE, which isn’t shipping yet, but Asus is taking pre-orders at a 25 dollar discount off the list price of $399.99. For your $375,00, you get a unit powered by Intel’s latest Atom CPU - the 1.67 GHz N280 which integrates north bridge functions such as the memory controller and graphics core into the processor die, draws only a minuscule 2.5 watts (roughly 10 times less than a Penryn Core 2 Duo CPU), and runs across a 667MHz frontside bus, with 1 GB of faster 667 MHz DDR2 RAM and Intel’s GN40 integrated graphics which includes hardware-based high-definition video decoders allowing for 720 HD playback, an LED backlit 10” display (1024 x 600 resolution), and an advertised 9.5 hour runtime on its six-cell battery (figure 6.5 to 8 hours in real-world use), featuring Asus’ proprietary Super Hybrid Engine (SHE) technology, which the company says can boost CPU speed for extra power or lower it to preserve battery life.
The 1000HE also comes with three USB ports (which you have to go 17” to get on a Mac laptop), a SDHC card slot, a VGA port; 10/100Mb/s Ethernet, 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0, a 160GB hard drive (plus included 10GB of file-encrypted Eee Online Storage), a Apple-esque chiclet type keyboard (slightly undersized at 92 percent, which should be tolerable for most folks) and multi-touch trackpad, all for an amazing $399.99.
Not to shabby at all for the money. Does anyone seriously wonder why netbooks are now reportedly slurping up 20 percent of the laptop market? As http://blogs.computerworld.com/apple_netbook_where_to_start Computerworld’s Seth Weintraub enthused last week, “I just fell in love with a laptop, and for the first time since the IBM Thinkpad T40, it isn’t a Mac.... The ASUS Eee PC 1000HE 10-Inch Netbook is exactly what I want in a Netbook....”
The question is begged again why Apple can’t, or more likely refuses to, equip any of its laptops except the top of the line 17” MacBook Pro with more than two USB ports (not to mention the contentious deletion of FireWire 400 from all but the holdover plastic MacBook) or SD Card slots on any of their portables, or why the pricey MacBook Air has no built-in Ethernet while even cheapo netbooks do.
Apple did an amazing defiance of gravity act in keeping sales robust up to Christmas, buoyed in no small measure by the timely introduction of the unibody MacBooks in mid-Autumn, but since the first of the year reportedly Mac sales have gone off the age of a proverbial cliff, while PC netbook sales continue to grow, and considering the comparative value they offer, why wouldn’t they?
Of course they don’t have the same build quality or presumed ruggedness as my new MacBook, nor the power of a full-fledged Core 2 Duo Penryn processor, or the sophistication and performance of the MacBook’s GeForce 9400M graphics chipset or as big a display or a full-sized keyboard, and it’s not as pretty. However you can forgive quite a lot when you’re paying less than a third of the MacBook’s price, especially if you’re in straitened budget circumstances.
Seth Weintraub contends that Apple could take the Asus Eee 1000HE feature set as a starting point, but use an aluminum housing and equip it with the Intel N280 CPU, but using Nvidia’s Ion Platform pairs the GeForce 9400 with with the Atom, 2 GB of CCR3 RAM upgradable to 4 GB, use Mac OS X of course, and sell it for $500 (or even little more to keep it comfortably above Steve Jobs’ arbitrary “junk” threshold. In other words, a MacBook nano. I’ll bet they would sell truckloads of those.
Personally, I’m going to find it a bit of a challenge to be working on a 13-inch ,1280 x 800 resolution display after three years on the 17” 1440 x 900 wide open spaces of my G4 PowerBook, but I don’t think I could go down to 1024 x 600 for production work. However, for a lot of folks, 1024 x 600 is adequate for their purposes. My wife, for example, is still happily getting along with my old 700 MHz G3 iBook (incidentally, last brand new computer I bought, just over six years ago) and not coming close to taxing the limits of its capabilities. A PC netbook like the Eee1000HT would suit her just fine, and vastly exceed her power and storage capacity needs for the foreseeable future, and I’m sure there are likely millions of other non-power user of laptop users who just wan to do a bit of word processing, get their email, and casually surf the Web who could say the same.
Another potential avenue for Apple to pursue is joint ventures with service providers for 3G enabled MacBooks. Appleinsider’s Aidan Malley reports that Apple’s iPhone partner AT&T is hoping to make 3G-enabled notebooks a staple of its cellular business, noting that in a Fortune interview AT&T’s Emerging Devices group president Glenn Lurie said he would like his company’s deals with Apple to extend beyond the iPhone, hinting that it may be chatting with Apple to extend its reach into MacBooks or other non-iPhone devices.
Which is all the more reason why Apple needs a small, relatively inexpensive product that is more than the iPhone or the iPod touch, nice as they are -- something with a real display and a real keyboard. With Ubuntu Linux Coming on strong in the netbook category and Windows 7 ramping out, the competition is only going to get tougher and more intense for laptop market share. ABI Research projects netbook category unit sales to increase from 35 million in 2009 to 139 million by 2013. The recently refreshed entry-level MacBook is a very good value for the money, especially by historical Apple standards, but aesthetically it’s getting along in the tooth, and looks like yesterday’s computer alongside the unibody MacBooks or even some of the nicer netbooks like the 1000HE. An aluminum MacBook nano as a replacement at the entry-level would be the computer of tomorrow.
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