Why Apple Won’t Make A (Cheap) Netbook Any Time Soon

The category of Netbooks is well populated with what is essentially bargain bin laptops in terms of computing power. Everyone from HP to ASUS is well into this new field of computers originating from 10-13″ inch ultra portables to palm sized, inch thin laptops oriented as glorified Smartphones but serve a greater function than surfing the web. This is precisely why Apple will never make a Netbook that is defined by today’s standards as being powered by a single core Atom CPU, small screen and minimal memory. It would mean a massive degradation of the current Mac OS X experience.

Apple themselves have said during the Q4 2008 earnings call, that it would be fundamentally hard to deliver a Mac at the $500 price point that isn’t a piece of junk. Sure, Apple got away with this briefly while the Mac Mini G4 took reign as their low end, entry level Mac but made serious compromises. No keyboard, mouse or monitor meant you had to buy them new, invest in an iMac or drop the Mini in your current setup. This gave Apple the perfect opportunity to market it as the Mac for switchers, they already had a keyboard, mouse and display. There was also the issue of having no Wireless, a minimal amount of RAM (originally 256 MB but wasn’t sustainable once Tiger pounced and was doubled) and a Combo drive which is still unacceptable in this day and age, it somehow managed to transition into the Intel Mac Mini.

But, the Mac Mini was a desktop, never mind the form factor, it wasn’t portable and it stayed on your desk for $500 when it was first introduced and $600 for the newest generation Mini. Now try applying that to a Netbook, a screen ranging anywhere from 7″ to 10″, a battery, keyboard and trackpad. Even greater compromises would have to be made such as downgrading to a single core  Atom CPU running at a max of 1.6 GHz (which is significantly lower than the Mini’s Core 2 Duo CPU clocked at 2 GHz) to retain that $500-$600 price point.

That would be doable but would impede heavily on Apple’s intention of what the end user experience will be like. Storage constraints if Flash Memory is used will likely inhibit iLife from being installed let alone ran on such pokey specs. A couple of Gigabytes would only remain after Leopard is installed and Core Effects would likely be scaled back to accommodate  a slower Graphics chipset.

Making a more robust Netbook would easily excel the unofficial $500 price barrier of this category of ultra portables but even if Apple could get away with charging in the upwards of $700, I doubt they could pull off a viable Netbook that doesn’t infringe on the core functionality of the OS and doesn’t set itself up as a throw away computer finding itself unsupported in the next OS release.