ITWire

If there's one thing you can say about Apple these days, it's that the company doesn't take unnecessary risks. Apple chooses markets very carefully and makes sure they're already well established before it enters them. Then Apple proceeds to blow the incumbent opposition away with a superior product.

The market was looking for Apple to release a Mac netbook - a netMac - at Macworld 2008. However, Apple wasn't interested. The market was too new and unproven.

So instead, Macworld 2008 saw Jobs strutting his stuff while stuffing an envelope with a MacBook Air. It was a beautiful product to be sure but with appeal limited to the premium end of the market.

One year on and things have changed dramatically. The US and, as a consequence, the rest of the world has been hit by a mother of an economic crisis and the netbook market has exploded.

The time seems ripe for Jobs to lob a few grenades of his own into the netbook market with an explosively good and affordable touch screen netbook that could be part iPhone, part MacBook, all cool and set to blow away the PC competition - yet again.

We know that Intel has already released a "nettop" Atom 330 dual-core processor, and we know that Apple gets special treatment from Intel and new processors early.

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