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Why Apple Might Hesitate Launching A 12” MacBook Pro (But I Hope They Don't)

by Charles W. Moore

Hadley Stern over at AppleMatters posted a column last week entitled “Ode to the 12” Powerbook: 14 Wishes for A New Hyper-Portable Macbook.” Like me, Hadley is hoping that Apple has a real replacement for the Little Al Book in the works, and his 14-point wishlist is as follows:

1. 10-12”inch screen
2. minimum 1024x768 resolution
3. airport (of course)
4. bluetooth (of course)
5. full-size, or darn near close, keyboard
6. magsafe with a small powerbrick, don’t pull a Mac-mini and make the power brick half the size of the portable
7. firewire 800, make this a true power portable
8. built in evdo
9. PC card slot
10. built in isight
11. built in gps
12. Shockingly thin and shockingly sturdy
13. Good battery life
14. An Apple-made docking device, much like IBM does for the (s)ThinkPads. Apple should do this across the portable line.

I can get behind most of that prescription in theory, although I think that such a comprehensive feature-set would be very difficult to deliver within a “Shockingly thin and shockingly sturdy” form factor -or even one at least as small and light as the erstwhile 12” PowerBook, which itself never supported FireWire 800 or a PC Card slot, let alone a built-in iSight camera, gps, or evdo.

Personally, I could happily live without any of the latter-mentioned items, although an ExpressCard 34 slot would be a nice addition. I also am not that enchanted with the MagSafe technology, which so far has obviated the availability of third-party power adapters for the MacBooks and MacBook Pros, although I suppose it is now obligatory on Apple notebooks.

I agree with Hadley that the new compact machine should be a MacBook Pro rather than a MacBook, since the primary market focus would be mobile professionals, and that there is a ton of pent-up demand for a small notebook with Intel power.

Apple definitely left a void (again) at the small end of its notebook lineup when it discontinued the 12” PowerBook when the MacBook was released back in May, 2006, and nice as it is, the MacBook, which is 7/10 of a pound heavier than the erstwhile Little Al, and nearly as big as the full-sized Titanium PowerBook was. Only .3 of a pound lighter that the current Core 2 Duo 15” MacBook Pro, it's simply not a satisfactory replacement for serious road warriors. Even the 12” PowerBook was on the heavy side for subnotebooks - at least compared with the gaggle of three pound PC notebooks available.

The key of course is what you have to leave out in order to pare the weight and bulk down. For instance, Dell’s three-pound Latitude D420 has a Core Duo 1.2 GHz processor, a 12.1” 1280 x 800 widescreen display, the Intel GMA 950 graphics accelerator used in the MacBook (which “shares” up to 224 MB of system RAM), built in wireless, a docking connector, three USB 2 ports, a 1394 (FireWire) 400 port, VGA out, sound in/out, an infrared port, and a SD Card slot. Bluetooth and a dock are optional as are optical drives in an external module. No camera, PC Card slot, GPS or FireWire 800.

Personally, I would prefer a built-in optical drive for convenience, but could get along with a modular unit, which does have the advantage of being more easily replaceable and upgradable than a built-in drive. Speaking of which, I would hope that hard drive access in a new subcompact MacBook Pro would be at least as easy as it is in the MacBook.

Sony’s 2.84 pound VAIO TXN15P/B notebook does include a DVD+R Double Layer/DVD±RW drive and integrated Bluetooth, but gets along with a 1.2 GHz Core Solo processor and a 11.1” widescreen display. The little VAIO has wireless support, and boasts an amazing 5-11 hours of battery life. It’s also pretty expensive at $ 2,199.99. I would hope that a MacBook Pro subnotebook would weigh in at less than that, but ultra-miniaturization doesn’t come cheap.

Hadley Stern suggested that using flash memory rather than a conventional hard drive might be one way of keeping size and weight down. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t keep cost down and storage capacities with NAND technology are still a lot less than with the spinning platters. It might be OK for a machine used as a mobile ancillary to a homebase desktop computer, but wouldn’t likely be adequate for the sort of portable workstation duty that the 12” PowerBook frequently served. Indeed, I used a 12” G3 iBook as my main production workhorse for more than three years, and wouldn’t personally consider a machine that didn’t at least surpass its capabilities in all contexts.

One of the holdups for Apple in getting a subnotebook MacBook Pro to market is that it will have to be designed and engineered pretty much from scratch, which is a major undertaking for a machine that will probably be more of a niche product than a volume-seller. The 12-inch PowerBook was relatively easy, because it was essentially an upmarket version of the volume-selling 12”i iBook, sharing much of the iBook’s internal engineering and built by the same subcontractor, resulting in economies of scale.

That isn’t possible this time around, because the MacBook platform is too big and heavy to spin a subnotebook off from. Even the 15 inch and 17 inch MacBook Pros share a fair bit of engineering commonality, but the 12-inch professional ‘Book was a completely different animal, sharing with its larger stablemates only the metal case styling motif.

The MacBook was virtually guaranteed to be a strong seller, and so it has turned out to be, so the expenditure of designing it as a new product from a clean sheet of paper (or these days a computer screen) was easy to justify, especially since there had been no completely new Apple consumer laptop platform for five years, but a clean slate effort for a unique and probably modest volume and machine is something other, especially when the flagship MacBook Pro designs are really still themselves adaptations of the aluminum PowerBooks that were first rolled out in 2003.

I suppose that general dynamic is one of the reasons why Apple’s coverage of the subnotebook category has tended to be sporadic, even erratic, over the years. The original PowerBook 100 back in 1991 was a near-subnotebook, weighing in at a moderate 5.1 pounds (partly achieved by making the floppy drive and external module), and measuring 1.8” x 11” x 8.5”, and like the 12-inch PowerBook didn’t share engineering commonality with the larger PowerBooks (it was built for Apple by Sony). It did not sell especially well. The PowerBook Duo, first rolled out in October, 1992, was an Apple-built machine, and had a long production run with Motorola 68030, 68040, and Power PC 603 CPUs, but I don’t think it was never much of a money-spinner for Apple. The PowerBook 2400c, introduced in May 1997, was another anomaly, made for Apple by IBM Japan. The 2400c was small, sleek, and lightweight (at 4.4 pounds, nearly half a pound lighter than the Duo 2300 and the lightest Apple portable ever) with an undersized (although otherwise very nice) keyboard, and marketed only in Asia and the US.

One way Apple could work around the the economy of scale issue would be to broaden the market for the new subnotebook platform by offering a MacBook version has well as a MacBook Pro, but a downside to that would be inevitable dilution of sales for the higher-priced model, and the addition of yet another model the Apple portable product lineup, with commensurate marketing and advertising costs. I think a subnotebook MacBook could very well be a successful product, but with less of an obvious market than for a small MacBook Pro aimed at business and professional users.

Speaking of which, for Dell or Sony, with the Windows PC’s strong and developed presence in business and institutional markets, offering subnotebook computers is a no- brainer. The sales potential is there ready and waiting. For Apple, offering such a machine is more of a roll-of-the-dice, especially until Apple decides whether or not it really wants to take a serious kick at developing enterprise markets for the Macintosh.

That said, I think there is a pretty strong probability that Apple is working on some sort of small and lightweight portable product, whether it’s a conventional subnotebook, or something else like a NAND flash memory machine or even a tablet notebook. There has been an awful lot of smoke about this recently for there not to be some fire in there somewhere. Perhaps the small will clear somewhat at Macworld Expo. Or not. We’ll have to wait and see. It won’t be much longer.

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