Hackintosh: Will Apple Make a Netbook?

There are of course different answers to that question: from Apple’s official comments on the matter the answer is “No” or at least “Not Now”; from my own experience the answer would be “No”, and; from my personal desires the answer would be “Heck yes!”

I’ve wanted Apple to make a really small Mac for a long time, even from before the discontinued the 12-inch PowerBook, which couldn’t really be called a netbook. Even though for Mac notebook standards it was relatively small with netbook standards it’s heavy and big.

But let’s be real and look at Apple’s closest attempt to a netbook to date, the MacBook Air. It’s a beautiful machine, for sure, but it’s also hampered with problems and limitations. Compared to many netbooks the Air’s battery life is pathetic. It may keep up in performance if you just look at the processor speed but in true performance there seems to be something holding the Air back. Then of course in ports and expandability, the Air is a nightmare. Let’s be fair, the screen is gorgeous, the keyboard is very good as it is pretty much full size, and the thinness and weight are amazing. But does the Air show anything giving us reason to think that Apple can put the same performance in an even smaller package? I’m not so sure. Do we really think that Apple would be happy with inevitable compromises of a netbook (smaller screen, smaller keyboard, etc.)? I don’t think so.

See, ever since shortly after the Air came out I’ve had this feeling it was a stop-gap product, something that Apple brought out in a hurry to keep the buying public interested for a few years until Apple could come up with the product they really wanted to bring out. Doesn’t the Air seem a bit rushed to you in terms of specifications and design? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Apple would discontiue it in another year or so, then announce something even more amazing, something they’ve had a few more years to work on. Be it a tablet, a netbook, or something completely different, who knows?

I’ve seen many of the current crop of netbooks and I can say for sure they are not pretty to look at, most of them. Sure there are details that are not too bad, as far as PCs go, but they are full of the typical ports and vents, stickers, and all; in brief, the scourge of PC computers in general. Why it’s so hard for any of them to crank out a really good looking netbook, I don’t understand. Even products, like the Psion Netbook (above), out in the market around 2000, which was actually really called “netbook” were not the most pretty things to look at. Although very interesting in some design details they never really reached the overall polish of Apple’s designs.

Then we come to the main reason for the great surge in netbook sales- that they are cheap. I got my Samsung NC10 for about a quarter of the price of the Air. Sure the NC10 has slower processor and less RAM than Air, but it has larger HDD (160GB), more ports, and at least double the battery life of the Apple notebook. And that’s important to many consumers. Walk around a mall in Dubai and you’re bound to see lots of netbooks, but few Macs. But Apple has never really gone for making cheap products, especially not cheap computers. If you recall, they’ve tried before to make so called “consumer lines” of computers, notably the LC and Centris series in the 1990s, but they were never as cheap as their PC rivals. And as much as we Apple fans try to convince people that they shouldn’t look at sticker price only, the sticker price is incredibly important. And for that fact alone, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that Apple is never going to make a netbook that competes on a sticker price-level with the other netbooks. If they would bring out a netbook, and I don’t think they will, at least not in the format of netbooks as we now know them, it will cost at least double of the other netbooks. But, of course, if they do so, I will still buy one, and so will thousands of other Apple fans.

My belief that Apple will not bring out a netbook anytime soon is partly behind my wish to try to put Leopard on my hackintosh NC10. But then again I’m also enough of a geek that I want to try this sort of thing anyway.

And we can throw into the mix Tim Cook’s, COO of Apple, recent comments about netbooks, that they are too much of a compromise and offer an inferior user experience. Apple knows better than you or I what the netbook market looks like; who is buying and how much they are buying. I’d imagine that Apple is hard at work trying to figure out what they are going to bring to the market that brings a better user experience and some “ooh and awh”, in true Apple style. Personally I think they’re more likely to scale up the iPhone form factor rather than scale down the MacBook Air.

If you are interested, here is a link to all my articles in the Hackintosh series.