Macbook Mini take II
rzwitserloot posted in apple on September 26th, 2006
Remember my prediction of the macbook mini?
I mentioned that in order for it to be really small and fairly cheap, not including a DVD or CD player of any kind would help reduce costs and make a 10″ casing design feasible. Offering movies as part of iTunes is pretty much a pre-requisite before the optical drive could be ditched, but iTunes just launched the very service, so that’s one part of the puzzle in place.
The other part is this nifty device. A 32GB solid state disk. whoo, still very expensive but if that ever drops into the 150 bucks range, the notebook can seriously reduce the size of the battery, reduce RAM and CPU speeds (an SSHDD boosts speed by being much faster compared to an ordinary HDD), thoroughly reduce battery size, and combining all those things, reduce the size and power of the fans.
Then again, apple has plenty of experience with tiny harddrives given their iPod line, so maybe going as far as including a solid state disk is overkill.
September 26th, 2006 at 20:04
I totally agree. Even beter, we just had a talk at the University about wether or not people would want this. Martijn agreed that he actually never would need a dvd player in his laptop again. So in that case this MacBook Mini is perfect.
September 27th, 2006 at 3:21
True, but remember that a macbook mini would be cheap and small. That also means a small screen. The market section for it would be those who currently own a desktop and do not particularly feel the call of needing a full notebook. This target market might be convinced to buy a macbook mini if it is SMALL and CHEAP. Exactly the kind of properties you don’t want in a device that counts as your main computer. It’s purposes would hence be:
Competition to PDAs: Quick access to address book, calendar, todo lists, email, web browsing, playing videos. Especially that last one - the tiny screen of your run of the mill PDA means a macbook mini’s 10″ should win easy on that front.
Portable workplace FOR EMERGENCIES: taking a presentation on the road, adding the final bits in the occasional plane flight, accessing a certain document if need be.
That’s it. The screen will just be too small, and the ‘book too underpowered, to use as main machine. Especially for the first, if I was apple, I’d throw in a SIM card slot and a GSM chip. Make it work with EVDO/UMTS/GPRS, and allow you to make phone calls with it. In fact, I’d throw that in all macbooks, on the theory that it’s very very nifty and unique, doesn’t take up much room (you should be able to use the wifi antenna for both without them interfering with each other - different frequencies), and the hardware required to do that isn’t that expensive. A SIM card reader and a generic run of the mill DAC unit that can run digital signal up the antenna at 800/900/1800/1900 Mhz. The en/decoding of the GSM signal can be done in software.
A notebook marketed specifically to be used as a sidekick to a desktop works well for apple - .mac isn’t all that great, but at least its far easier to sync stuff that way. Good sync support is crucial if one is to have 2 different machines. To boost that along, I’d sell macbook minis with 3 years worth of .MAC membership free. In fact, if I was apple, I’d throw that in for everybody, and then make some sort of .mac premium, which buys you a gazillion GBs extra. People will shell out the cash in combination with time machine’s backup facilities. Apple already has infrastructure for massive bandwidth (ITMS, trailers.apple.com), so all they need to provide per .mac member is some harddrive space. Big deal. Not expensive.