There are rumors that Apple is working on inexpensive MacBook. And not “cheap for a Mac,” but a real cheap laptop, perhaps as low as $599. For a company that has traditionally focused on the more premium end of the market, this would be something of a turnaround.
Of course, Apple takes great pride in its design and aesthetics. So the company isn't just going to take the innards of the MacBook Air, put them in a cheap plastic case and call it a day. Instead, Apple is supposedly creating a smaller laptop with a lower resolution screen and an “all-new design” based on the iPhone's processor.
This chip could be some version of the A19 used in the current iPhone lineup, but the analyst Ming-Chi Kuo earlier this year said the company was working on a laptop based on last year's A18.
If the idea of ​​a small, inexpensive laptop powered by an ultra-low-power chip sounds familiar, well, it should—we're used to calling them netbooks. Netbooks arrived on the scene at a strange time in the late aughts, as we were transitioning to an Internet-centric computing world.
What set netbooks apart from other laptops was their focus on portability, battery life, and rock-bottom prices at almost any cost. Original netbook, ASUS Eee PCcame in two sizes (7-inch or 10-inch) and ran on a budget Intel Celeron M processor. But even this slow and low-power processor was too demanding for the tiny Eee PC, so ASUS reduced its frequency to 630 MHz. (Yes, back in the halcyon days of 2007 we measured processor speed in MHz, not GHz.)
Intel saw this emerging trend and created processors specifically for netbooks called Atom. In many ways, Atom chips were Intel's answer to the growing power of ARM and even formed the basis for the development of tablets and smartphones. This is essentially the opposite of what Apple did, which took its A-series mobile processor and turned it into a powerful laptop chip. (And it seems he's back again.)
As we all now know, netbooks were not in this world for long. A number of things contributed to their demise. First of all, most of them were just never especially good. And the ones that weren't terrible usually cost a little more. Of course, you can get a 7-inch Eee PC for around $200. But something more capable, like HP Mini 210 HDcould cost you around $385 in 2010, depending on configuration. Adjusted for inflation, that's just over $577. As prices for regular laptops dropped, this deal no longer seemed like a particularly good deal.
But the two biggest culprits are undoubtedly the advent of Chromebooks and iPads. (We'll save a discussion of Chromebooks for another day.) The iPad was introduced in 2010, and it immediately started eating V netbook market share. By 2012 tablets have overtaken netbooksand by 2013, netbooks were virtually extinct. Sure, some of them still existed, and you had a spiritual successor in the form of the Chromebook, but the iPad helped destroy the netbook quickly and effectively.
Many of the things you could use a netbook for—web browsing, checking email, chatting in the void of what was then called Twitter—were now done better by the iPad. And when paired with a Bluetooth keyboard, the iPad was actually a decent productivity machine if your expectations were low.
And so, the netbook disappeared.
But this new, cheaper MacBook, at least on paper, sounds like it borrows a bit from the netbook blueprint. Some people will simply never be able to adapt to a tablet and keyboard workflow. So Apple may be able to provide them with a suitable laptop form factor.
While we don't know what the screen size will be, we do know that it will be smaller than the current 13.6-inch MacBook Air. This could mean 13.3 inches, but perhaps Apple will bring it back 12″ format or even return to 11 inches the realm of its smallest Air model. This is a gradual penetration into the territory of netbooks.
Couple all of this with a mobile-focused SoC that will handle everyday tasks and web browsing with aplomb, but is definitely not up to the task of heavier tasks like video editing or gaming, and you've got something that sounds like an original idea for a netbook if you ask me. Apple will obviously never call its new affordable MacBook a netbook, but perhaps by avoiding that name it can make them cool again.
