If Apple does not come out with a sub $500 MacNetBook people would just buy Acer, Dell, XO etc instead of more profitable full size MacBooks.
Okay, wait. It has always been the view of those in the press to view an existing market that Apple's currently not in, and wonder when Apple will enter the market. They keep making the mistake that the black-brick object of the market, whether it's a PIM, phone, laptop, or cheap computing device, whatever, that when Apple enters the market they're going to have a tough time replicating existing box 'X' by putting their own skin on it and selling it with the obligatory Apple Markup.
But that has never been what Apple has done in the past. It has happened so very many times over & over that it's shocking that the NYT, WSJ, and other media keep bringing up the issue in those terms.
It's in Apple's business interest to sell hardware. To do so, they have consistently shown that their preference is to design something different enough with something "special" that customers feel compelled to buy it. That has never been just a cool-looking skin.
There is absolutely no evidence by inductive reasoning that we should expect Apple to have any interest in simply delivering a NetBook brick like all the rest that simply runs OS X. Apple's sales & marketing wouldn't be tearing their hair out. The existing market for NetBook offers Apple zero competitive advantage if they were to simply load their OS into some cheapo NetBrick, paint an aluminum skin around it and slap an Apple logo onto it.
It has never been that Apple simply offers their version of the same thing, but it just happens to run OS X. They're in the game to sell hardware. If their OS were good enough alone to sell the hardware then dumping the OS onto any whitebox junkbox would make it a compelling Apple product, but imagine doing that. It's not enough, is it? I mean, it's a fine OS but so is Vista Ultimate (with OneCare psst). So is Linux for that matter. Why go Apple, then? There needs to be more to the recipe and that's where the integrated design of the OS & hardware reviewers keep missing the mark.
It's not just that Apple gets to design the hardware and OS together & keep it from crashing that compell people to buy the product. That's not it at all either. As much as they like to teae MS about it, Apple's OS X has its share of grey-screen "kernel panics" and it DOES freeze, with their own stupid products such as Safari being the worst offenders causing the freezing.
To get people to buy their products they've been offering:
1. integrated mechanical & asthetic design
2. hardware that offers some some new or emerging feature.
3. a user interface that, as closely as possible, allows the user to intuit their way to accomplishing their task.
The OS not the key. The aluminum skin is not the key. Controlling the OS and hardware together is not the thing either. Identifying an emerging market is not Apple's game either.
Finding an existing market where they can improve the user interface enough and adding some cool new features to make it a really compelling sale -- That's their target and they've said so. Steve Jobs has said so. Tim Cook has said so. But the papers & media, well, they keep missing the point.
Soo... Apple OS on a $500 NetBook. No. At least not on what we now consider "a NetBook". No profit or Advantage to Apple in that. So I doubt they're tearing their hair out.
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