Comments on: Critical thinking

By: ssp

ssp — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:14:33 +0000

@Jesper: Yup. Looks like Safari\'s auto-fill got the better of me there. The beginning of the URL looks correct in the field.

In retrospect, it seems like Mr Jobs managed to change his mind (although he probably won\'t admit that) as far as feature-completeness in a laptop is concerned but they still decided against creating a small computer. They just went for a thin one.

The wireless disk sharing seems a cool alternative to the iTMS solution I had in mind, though.

By: Jesper

Jesper — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 21:40:01 +0000

ssp: I have reason to believe that URL you gave wasn't the intended one.

By: ssp

ssp — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 20:18:54 +0000

Apple won't introduce a smaller machine because they believe that even a portable computer should be able to do everything. I think Mr. Jobs even stated that once somewhere. Hence we are stuck with machines that have screens you can actually work on, a full set of ports and an optical drive. The same could be the answer for your third question. Although, personally I have thought for a long time that Apple should get rid of the optical drive. If they want to be bold, they should give you a machine that comes without an optical drive but makes it an _optional_ extra. The package will include something like a 8GB thumb drive with the OS. Updates for that can be bought from the iTunes store. That would be both innovative and make a lot of sense. But Apple haven't done it so far although they could have pulled it if they really wanted to. Which in turn might be a reason why they won't do it now either ;)

No idea about the flash thing. That writing point Jesper makes may be a good one. On the other hand I'd think that having a flash drive would enable them to make the machine really small/pretty and really expensive/profitable. All of which are things which Mr. Jobs seems to like. So if the technical limitations can be overcome in any way, I'd bet they'd go for it.

By: Jesper

Jesper — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 19:49:41 +0000

Solid-state: Because flash memory is not primed to sustain heavy writing over time. At least right now, Mac OS X swaps and caches heavily to disk.

Optical drive: Because even if it's detachable, you don't know when you'll need it, so it's likely you're going to forget to bring it. (This is why I like my "docks-onto-the-bottom" theory - people can just bring it anyway and not have anything dangling off the edge.)

The biggest reason why you wouldn't go below 12" is obviously because even with high DPI and resolution independence (which will take Apple a while to finish even in its own apps), it might just be too piddly for a useful laptop.

By: Peter Hosey

Peter Hosey — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 19:47:28 +0000

I'll kick it off:

Apple won't introduce a 12″ laptop because it could be hard to differentiate from the 13″ MacBooks. However, Apple could still introduce something smaller—perhaps 9″ or 10″.
Apple won't introduce a laptop with a SSD because those are still freaking expensive.
Apple won't introduce a laptop without an optical drive because you still need it occasionally (to use the Mac OS X DVD, especially to upgrade to a new Mac OS X).

And to rebut myself on that last point, Apple could call a Mac without an optical drive the “MacBook Satellite” or something, to express that it's intended to be used with another computer. You would use that computer (and TDM on the Satellite) to upgrade the Satellite's OS.

However, that could severely limit its market to people who either (a) have a (sufficient) Mac already or (b) have enough money and confidence to buy two Macs.