Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 31 October 2008 11:30
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 2
Remember the movie Swordfish? It was all about misdirection, indicating
one position and then taking on another. Will 2009 see Macs with
Blu-ray and a Mac Netbook despite Jobs saying it was all a bag of hurt
and netbooks are crap?
Whether you’ve seen the movie Swordfish or not, the world knows that Steve Jobs has misled us all in the past on his true intentions.
One was with the iPhone, something he was working on for several years while bringing out updates to the iPod.
Then, while competitors were working on video players, Steve Jobs said no-one wanted video in their pocket on a small screen.
This would have been while Apple was indeed working on a video capable iPod, the mobile version of OS X and the iPhone itself.
Now we have Jobs saying that Blu-ray is a “bag of hurt” and that he can’t make a Mac netbook that wouldn’t be a “piece of crap”.
The thing is, PC manufacturers have figured out how to put Blu-ray into their desktop and notebook computers easily enough, and there are plenty of netbooks out there running hacked versions of Mac OS X quite happily.
A friend who is loyal Mac user, owning a Powerbook and a recent iMac, just bought himself a 10-inch netbook with 1.6Ghz processor, 160GB hard drive and 1GB of RAM.
He’s also an iPod Touch owner, but given he’s had a Nokia N95 since they launched (which he loves), and already owns an iPod Touch, he can’t see any reason to buy an iPhone at the moment.
He was very interested in discovering what the new MacBook and MacBook Pro models were going to be like, but given that Apple’s “new” models always seem to suffer some initial problems, and given that he actually likes and uses FireWire, which has been stripped out of the new MacBook, he’s waiting for the “next” versions of these models before buying.
Although he has an Intel powered iMac, he needed a simple way to load new firmware onto his Nokia N95. Although his wife and son both use PCs, he didn’t want to use their computers or go through the hassle of loading VMware Fusion or Parallels onto his Mac.
That would have meant buying Windows XP or Vista, then paying more money for virtualisation software.
His needs were simple – a small, portable computer with decent size keys, a large enough screen and Windows XP so he could load the Nokia PC Suite.
He would have been the perfect customer for an $800 Mac Netbook, even if it wasn’t able to run Nokia’s PC Suite (and would have required spending money on a legal copy of XP and Fusion or Parallels), but in the absence of anything from Apple in the netbook space, he bought a PC netbook instead.
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