Ok, so some of this may be people delaying a purchase to wait for Win7, but that's probably just a few percent, and Apple buyers may be doing the same with Snow Leopard. I'm thinking that Apple feels vindicated by a decision not to chase low-end volume with higher cost Mac Netbooks and that iPod Touch and iPhone volume is enough to keep their foot in the water with mobile computing until they come out with the device that they are supposed to announce in June.

If you give someone a netbook with OSX, they will expect to install their own apps. Apple has that capped off right now by forcing the iPhone folks to go through the app store.

Apple would be better off selling a $200 bluetooth keyboard for the iPhone, and you could even give it a nice shiny aluminum case to prop up the phone as the display. Those would be even cheaper to produce, and provide a nice upsell to those who want functionality.

Oh — and you could run a small chip in the keyboard to provide the cut and paste. ;)

Seriously, the issue for Apple is they can't control the user experience on a Netbook. Most of what happens on a Netbook is browser-based, and they would be hard pressed to scale down their OS to match what you could do cheaper with Linux.

Except they already have scaled the Mac OS and Safari down — what do you think is running on the iPhone? So it doesn't seem impossible to me.

@Forge42:

There's no way they can shoehorn a netbook into their business model/pricing structure.

I also don't see why Apple couldn't make a 10″ Mac netbook for $600-$900. That should have reasonably good hardware, get them their premium and provide an entry in the space. I think Apple is more worried about cannibalizing their own notebook market, but most netbooks seem to be second PCs, not primary ones, so I'm not sure Apple needs to worry that much.

While it's true that netbooks have “cramped keyboards” and “very small screens”, that's part of the tradeoff for better portability. Apple then makes it laughable by suggesting an iPhone as a replacement, which has an even smaller screen and an even more cramped keyboard (if you even count the virtual keyboard).

Steve

<sarcasm>And, boy, they were *so wrong* not to chase the cheap, low-margin UMPC market!</sarcasm>

It doesn't seem as if Apple is suffering all that much for not having low-margin Netbooks. Their Mac business is down 3% year over year for Q1 (traditionally their weakest quarter), but IDC and Gartner estimates that the PC business is down 6.9%. And Apple gets all of these great margins on every sale, and they have branched out so that they are not so dependent on the computer market anymore anyway. Seems to me that the PC makers are probably more jealous of Apple's success right now than anything.

Would I love a more portable Mac? Yes! Is the MacBook 13″ a good enough replacement? It is for me.

The netbook's appeal is you can pay 50% of full laptop price and get 90% of the functionality.

Apple's business model is for you to pay 50% to 100% more for a pretty piece of hardware with a shiny OS on it.

There's no way they can shoehorn a netbook into their business model/pricing structure. Honestly, it isn't that surprising that he mentions the iPhone as their answer to netbooks, cause that hardware is as close as they can get to the netbook price point. The next step up would be the $2,000 Air.

The price point between in iPhone/iPod Touch and an Apple Netbook is $1200 or so?

That's an awful lot to pay for Cut-and-Paste.

Seriously, the issue for Apple is they can't control the user experience on a Netbook. Most of what happens on a Netbook is browser-based, and they would be hard pressed to scale down their OS to match what you could do cheaper with Linux.

Also, they likely wouldn't get the trendy factor that would lock in with a wireless provider.