Rumor has it, Apple is working on a low-cost MacBook. And not “low cost for a Mac”, but a reasonably cheap laptop, possibly under $599. For a company that traditionally targets the more premium end of the market, this would be an about-face.
Of course, Apple takes great pride in its design and aesthetics. So the company won’t just take the MacBook Air’s internals, slap on a cheap plastic case, and call it a day. Instead, Apple is building a smaller laptop, with a lower-resolution screen and a “completely new design” around the iPhone processor.
That chip could be some version of the A19 found in the current iPhone lineup, but analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claimed earlier this year that the company is working on a laptop powered by last year’s A18.
If the idea of a small, low-cost laptop running on an ultra-powerful chip sounds familiar, well, it should—we used to call them netbooks. Netbooks burst onto the scene at an odd time in the late aughts as we transitioned into a world of web-first computing.
What set netbooks apart from other laptops was their portability, battery life, and rock-bottom prices at almost any price point. The original netbook, the ASUS EEE PC, came in two sizes (7-inch or 10-inch) and ran on Intel’s budget Celeron M processor. But even this slow, low-power CPU was demanding for a small EEE PC, and so Asus only clocked it at 630 MHz. (Yes, in the halcyon days of 2007, we measured CPU speed in megahertz, not gigahertz.)
Intel saw this emerging trend and built a CPU just for netbooks called Atom. In many ways, Atom chips were Intel’s answer to Arm’s growing power, and even formed the basis of its tablet and smartphone efforts. It’s basically the opposite of Apple, which took its mobile A-series processor and turned it into a powerful laptop chip. (And, once again, it seems so.)
As we all know now, netbooks were not long for this world. A number of things helped spell his demise. For one, most of them were never particularly good. And the ones that weren’t terrible were a little pricier. Sure, you can get a 7-inch EEE PC for around $200. But something more capable, like the HP MINI 210 HD, could set you back about $385 in 2010, depending on the configuration. When adjusted for inflation, this is a hair over 77,577. When regular laptop prices dropped, it didn’t seem like a particularly good deal anymore.
But the two biggest culprits undoubtedly emerge as Chromebooks and iPads. . By 2012, tablets had overtaken netbooks, and by 2013, netbooks were effectively dead. Sure, some are still around. Here and there and here and there
Many of the things one might have used a netbook for — browsing the web, checking e-mail, shouting at the void on what was then called Twitter — were now better handled by the iPad. And, when paired with a Bluetooth keyboard, the iPad was actually a decent productivity machine, as long as your expectations were low.
And just like that, the netbook disappeared.
But this new, cheaper MacBook, at least on paper, looks like it’s borrowing a bit from the netbook blueprint. Some people will never be able to adjust to the workflow of a tablet and keyboard combo. So Apple is giving them a proper laptop form factor.
While we don’t know what the screen size will be, we do know that it will be smaller than the current 13.6-inch MacBook Air. That could mean 13.3 inches, but perhaps Apple will bring back the 12-inch form factor or even look at the 11-inch bezel of its smallest Air model. It enters netbook territory.
Combine all this with a mobile-first SoC that will handle everyday tasks and browsing with aplomb, but certainly won’t cut it for heavy tasks like video editing or gaming, and you’ve got something that looks like a real pitch for a netbook if you ask me. Apple will obviously never call its new affordable MacBook a netbook, but maybe by avoiding the name, it can make them cool again.
