Apple Has To (and Will) Have a Netbook

On my Christmas vacation I carried a new friend with me that everyone was nuts about. What was it? What’s the brand? How much did it cost?

I had just bought a brand new MSI Wind on Amazon.com for a little less than $400 bucks.

Eight months later I can tell you that this machine has increased my work output by at least 10x. I carry it everywhere, I’m now writing a novel, two blogs and coding my next app while riding on the subway, I take it to the conference room and show power point presentations under my co-worker’s jealous glances, I surf the web while watching TV and my wife almost doesn’t mind it. Without knowing it, I had been waiting for a long time for something like this, and so were thousands of people.

The only thing, of course, is that it’s not an Apple — and I’m an Apple fan. I have an iPhone, an iMac and an iBook, and would have loved this next purchase to be an iTablet.

Apple reportedly refuses to get into this market. When asked by investors on a recent earnings call, Apple’s COO, Tim Cook, said that netbooks were “much less powerful” than consumers wanted, with cramped keyboards and small displays.

The thing is that consumers don’t want powerful computers anymore. We have arrived to that geeky dream that many visionaries forecast years ago: the computer is the client. The CPU is the web and there’s huge amounts of money to make by consuming services on the cloud.

And the keyboard is not bad at all. Maybe on some models, but not on my MSI. Plus doesn’t Apple love a challenge? Can you come up with a virtual touch-screen keyboard that’s not cramped. Yes, you can.

According to Fortune magazine, Netbook sales will reach 22 million units by 2010, while Apple’s Mac sales fell last quarter for the first time in five and a half years. The iPhone’s novelty is wearing off and is being attacked left and right by Google Android powered cell phones. iPods are history.

An employee from one of Apple’s suppliers reportedly confirmed that Apple was developing a netbook and if you remember the time just before the iPhone came out, there was a lot of denying from Apple that they were working on it.

I am sure we will see the iTablet just in time for the holiday season. But the key here is that Apple has to change the approach of selling it for a thousand bucks and getting huge margins. That’s no longer a netbook by definition. They have to make the money on the App Store side, not on the hardware.

I will bet you we’ll read this post in 6 months and say “wow, and it was better than anything we imagined.”

Photo by -eko-

Tagged as: Apple, future, netbook, rumors