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The ‘Book Mystique - Why Apple Still Needs A Netbook -- Really

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

by Charles W. Moore

Throughout 2009, I frequently harangued here and elsewhere about how Apple was missing out on the netbook wave. Steve Jobs had appeared to slam the door on netbooks with his October, 2008 remarks that it would be impossible to build a computer for under $500 that wasn’t “junk,” and that “there are markets that Apple chooses not to serve.”

Well, fair enough, but the $500 caveat really doesn’t definitively apply to the netbook sector, since there are now a number of high-end PC netbooks selling well in excess of that figure, and with netbooks being far and away the most promising growth growth sector in the entire PC category worldwide, Apple seems to be obstinately spiting itself by refusing to accommodate an obviously large number of users who really do want a small, light, laptop computer with a traditional clamshell form factor and a real keyboard, a pointing device that doesn’t involve smearing the display with your grubby fingers, and that has decent conductivity and expandability.

This is not that tall an order. There are a passel of PC netbooks that satisfy these criteria, but the grief for MacOS X fans is that none of them will officially support our chosen operating system. Some netbooks have proved reasonably “hackintoshable,” but that’s not really a satisfactory solution.

So what about the iPad? Unfortunately, whether it ultimately proves to be a rip-roaring marketing success or an embarrassing failure, it’s no substitute for a real works-for-a-living living laptop computer. I can conceive of the iPad carving out a whole new category of personal computing, but it really has more in common with the iPhone and iPod touch than it does with its MacBook cousins.

I’m not suggesting that Apple should necessarily have built a netbook instead of the iPad. It shouldn’t be an either/or zero-sum equation, but rather ideally both.

An awful lot of folks more erudite and with better access to actuarial data and analysis than I have are predicting that netbooks will remain the strongest potential growth category in personal computers for the foreseeable future. PC Pro recently quoted Warren East, CEO of the British chip design firm, which is Intel’s biggest rival in netbook processors and incidentally also supplier of the basic silicon Apple’s A4 iPad CPU is based on, saying he believes netbooks are on the way to dominating the PC market.

“Although netbooks are small today – maybe 10% of the PC market at most – we believe over the next several years that could completely change around and that could be 90% of the PC market,” East told PC Pro. “We see those products as an area for a lot of innovation and we want that innovation to be happening around the ARM architecture.”

East conceded that the biggest obstacle to ARM’s further penetration of the netbook space is Windows’ non-support of his hardware, something Apple could exploit were it so inclined. As East put it in the PC Pro interview, “What’s holding [ARM] back is people’s love of the Microsoft operating system and that fact that it’s familiar and so on. But actually the trajectory of progress in the Linux world is very, very impressive. I think it’s only a matter of time for ARM to gain market share with or without Microsoft.”

The Register’s Tony Smith deduces that a large proportion of current laptop owners use their machines solely for Internet activities, and for many of them, the netbook’s advantages will compensate for various netbook limitations, and he can envision lots of folk -- maybe even a majority -- downsizing to smaller computers, but notes that anyone who needs real processing power for stuff like serious gaming, video, high-end graphics work, and such, will still need more powerful machines and there are plenty of people out there who fall in those categories.

Even Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who has a few clues about the personal computer business, told Macworld UK’s Nick Spence reports last week that he thinks Apple’s iPad is a “nice reader,” but still claims netbooks are the way forward, and while Gates copped to BNET’s Brent Schlender in an interview that he had been in awe of the iPhone when it was first released, he perceives nothing in the iPad that excites excite him similarly, contending that devices with some mixture of voice, the pen and a real keyboard, ergo: netbooks, are the way forward. commenting that while it’s a nice reader, there’s nothing on the iPad to make him say, “Oh, I wish Microsoft had done it.”

DIGITIMES’ Max Wang and Joseph Tsai say that according to Acer Taiwan president Scott Lin the market focus will be on netbooks and ultra-thin notebooks for 2010 and that he believes the iPad is unlikely to impact the notebook/netbook markets since the two products target completely different consumer groups.

Nevertheless, at the iPad launch event Steve Jobs continued to gratuitously dismiss of the netbook, slamming them as “slow” and sporting “low-quality displays” (even though many higher-end netbooks now have LED backlit screens arguably superior to the iPad’s display). The problem with them being, in his view that “netbooks aren’t better than anything”.

That’s at best a subjective value judgment. Computerworld “Seeing Through Windows” blogger Preston Gralla thinks that when it comes to overall sales, netbooks will continue to clearly be better than at least one thing - the iPad, predicting that netbook sales will continue to soar, dwarfing iPad sales,and noting that Steve Jobs’ assertion that netbooks aren’t better than anything simply isn’t true.

ZNet’s Sam Diaz, a Self-Described “Mactard,” and a big fan of Apple products, with a house full of Macbooks and iPods, a Time Capsule and even an AppleTV, vows that his Mac hardware retinue will not include an iPad -- not because he doesn’t like it -- he actually thinks it’s actually a very nice device, but not offering enough value for him to buy, even at 500 bucks

The fact is that that there are just a great many things that a small laptop can do that an iPad simply can’t. Netbooks can play HD video without choking thanks to supporting Flash which the iPad doesn’t, multitasking which the iPhone OS used in the iPad doesn’t support, video chat with webcams of which the iPad has none, running a full-fledged operating system that can be used for programming or modification, uploading photos from a camera without mucking about with a USB adapter dongle -- most netbooks have 2 or even 3 USB ports standard, store more than 64GB of data (let alone the paltry 16 MB in the base $500 iPad), with even the most basic netbooks these days shipping with 160GB hard drive, no Skype, no playing FaceBook and other browser games (no Flash, again), swapping batteries (of course you can’t do that on the latest Apple laptops either), no support for optical drives -- either built in or peripherally connectable via USB, no real keyboards and pointing/clicking input, (iPad’s optional keyboard dock can’t be used for lap typing there’s no mouse input capability at all -- no Bluetooth, no USB -- it’s touch or nothing), hardware upgradability -- especially for RAM and data drive capacity is also not supported by the iPad. In short, netbooks can be used as practical platforms for writing, photo editing and publishing, their key advantage being the real keyboard and trackpad input, without which no one grounded in reality should envision the iPad pulling the rug from under netbook makers’ feet anytime soon.

eWeek’s Don Reisinger posted a withering indightment of the iPad’s manifold shortcomings this week saying that while Apple has been touting the iPad tablet as “revolutionary,” closer inspection reveals a host of omissions, shortcomings, and if we’re honest major flaws that Jobs and company would just as rather we not know or think about.

Reisinger’s list of iPad deficiencies includes:
• Hobbled web surfing - notably non-support of Flash
• No multitasking, which he, like me, regards as a necessity
• No video output port
• No printer support
• No optical drive or provision for connecting an external one
• The $499 version is a questionable bargain, with a 16GB storage drive and no 3G connectivity
• No E-Ink or OLED display to facilitate longer reading period comfort without eyestrain
• No USB or FireWire ports
• Any iPhone/ iPod touch app that hasn’t been updated won’t fit the iPad’s display

Before it’s even released, the iPad trails typical netbooks in performance, and that gap will continue to widen. The Register’s Tony Smith reports that Atom-based netbooks should speed up later this year when Intel releases upgraded Atom CPUs able address faster memory than the current versions support.

Today’s top-of-the-line netbook Atom, the 1.66 GHz N450, connects to DDR 2 RAM through its built-in memory controller but later in 2010 Intel will release the N455, which will support much faster DDR 3 memory and also consume less power.

The long and short of it is that Apple is simultaneously shunning what could be a promising and successful marketing opportunity while short-changing loyal Mac OS fans by continuing to reject building a netbook.

The MacBook Air is the closest thing to a netbook Apple has yet produced, but it’s way too expensive for what it does, and getting pretty long in the tooth design wise as well. Another complaint about the MacBook Air is that its 13 inch display obligates a footprint larger than many netbook fans (or for that matter PowerBook 12 inch fans) consider ideal or even acceptable. What is needed is a polycarbonate plastic bodied small clamshell laptop with an 11 inch or 12 inch display, as good keyboard, a decent compliment of I/O ports (ie: better than the MacBook Air’s pathetic few) and a SD Card reader, running the full Mac OS and selling for substantially less than the entry-level $999 MacBook, but it would not have to be as low as Steve Jobs $500 (“junk” threshold.

They could sell a ton of those, and perhaps even more importantly shore up the dam breach of defection to PC space by erstwhile Macheads fed up with Apple refusing to supply them with the computer product they want rather than what Apple thinks they should want.

CM