Critical thinking
There’s a lot of rumor going around that Apple’s going to introduce some sort of small laptop at Macworld Expo. Personally, if they make one 12″ or smaller, I’ll want one.
But people have been wrong before. Look how many times people guessed “iPhone” or “full-screen iPod” before they finally arrived. And other popular guesses have been completely wrong; in these cases, the discussion after the keynote often turns to why that idea was stupid and Apple would never have considered such a foolish pursuit.
So, as much as I want a small laptop, let’s get that out of the way now. I’ll pose several separate questions, and you can answer any of them that you want to. If we can’t come up with anything, I think that we may be able to look forward to a “MacBook mini” at Macworld Expo.
- Why won’t Apple introduce a laptop smaller than 12″?
- Why won’t Apple introduce a laptop with a solid-state (flash-memory) drive?
- Why won’t Apple introduce a laptop without an optical drive?
Comments and debate are welcome; nay, invited.
January 12th, 2008 at 11:47:28
I’ll kick it off:
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.
January 12th, 2008 at 11:49:41
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.
January 12th, 2008 at 12:18:54
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.
January 12th, 2008 at 13:40:01
ssp: I have reason to believe that URL you gave wasn’t the intended one.
January 17th, 2008 at 09:14:33
@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.
November 29th, 2008 at 09:18:53
My gut feeling is that Apple probably can’t produce the product it’d want a sub-notebook or overgrown-iPod touch to be without it being horrifically expensive. As much as Apple is a premium brand, there’s an inbuilt “smaller” = “cheaper” mindset amongst many consumers, and there’s a reasonable amount of precedent when it comes to sub-notebooks already.
Bear in mind, of course, that they already have released a notebook with an SSD and without an optical drive, and it’s rather pricey.
Personally, I’d buy a 10-12″ Mac OS X-running “Mac Nano” in a heartbeat (multitouch screen, as per the iPhone/iPod, basically a slab of glass, all input not accomplished by touchscreen is handled via optional bluetooth keyboard and mouse).
November 29th, 2008 at 09:50:28
Mo:
Yes. Apple introduced that computer, the MacBook Air, on 2008-01-15. This post, which I wrote and published on 2008-01-12, was about the rumors of the MacBook Air.