“Steven P. Jobs appeared as a surprise ‘special guest’ on Apple’s earnings call Tuesday afternoon,” John Markoff reports for The New York Times.
Markoff reports, “The most fun on the conference call came when he parried analysts’ questions about new product areas that Apple might or might not enter. A recurring question among Apple watchers for decades has been, ‘When is Apple going to introduce a low-cost computer?'”
“Mr. Jobs answered that decades-old complaint by stating, ‘We don’t know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk.’ He argued instead that the company’s mission was to add more value for customers at current price points,” Markoff reports.
“However, he gave a more nuanced answer to the question of whether Apple plans to jump into the ‘nascent’ market for netbooks, essentially restating his comments on the question from last week at the Macbook introduction in Cupertino by saying the company was taking a wait-and-see attitude,” Markoff reports. “At the same time, he noted that the company already had a powerful entry in the category: the iPhone. (By that standard, Apple is already the dominant netbook manufacturer by orders of magnitude.)”
“Mr. Jobs also said the company “had some pretty interesting” ideas if the category continues to evolve,” Markoff reports.
“That would seem to confirm findings that a search engine company shared with me on condition that I not reveal its name: The company spotted Web visits from an unannounced Apple product with a display somewhere between an iPhone and a MacBook,” Markoff reports. “Is it the iPhone 3.0 or the NetMac 1.0?”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “RadDoc” for the heads up.]
Or is it the “MacBook touch” about which we reported on July 22, 2008? We hear that Macworld Expo 2009 is going to be very interesting.
What a coincidence.
How about a sub-notebook with OSX loaded with a bootloader like Psystar.
False alarm! That was me using my eMate.
Okay… wait.
A while back one of you explained to me how a company can know from its net logs which browsers people are using to view its site. But how in the world can they know what SIZE visitors’ displays are? That’s creeping me out. And what other sizes can you web geeks discern? Cup sizes? C.D. collections? The contents of our sock drawers? I.Q.s?
Oh, the I.Q. thing is pretty self-evident…
Okay, maybe I’m being thick-headed tonight, but what exactly does this mean?
I mean, how difficult is it for me to disguise my MacBook Pro as say a:
“MBT 720×480”
when doing searches in Google?
lies
in the media
there is no tablet mac
damn
I don’t think you can disguise display resolution of your PC when surfing online (including doing searches in Google). Every single file our browser downloads (HTML, jpeg, gif, javascript…) creates a log entry, which has date, time, IP address, ‘user agent’ (the identifier that browser sends to identify itself as, say, Firefox for Linux, or Safari for Mac), display resolution (1024×768), colour depth (16-bit) and some other stuff. Other than browser agent, which can, on some browsers, be controlled, you can’t manipulate any other data.
So, if there was a web device with resolution of, say, 800×600, and 16-bit colour depth, and user agent was Safari, it would have to be a non-existent MacBook (light? touch? lite?).
It could also very well be a hackintosh machine running on an EEE PC.
Apple probably make dozens of prototypes that never see the light of day commercially. I’m sure they are even taken for a ride on the internet.
Apple won’t announce a product like this until after the all important Xmas quarter. MWSF at the earliest, IF, and that’s a big IF SJ wants to pull the trigger.
Monday, JANUARY 5, 2009, San Francisco !!!!
Those who might remember, Apple had a series of what today would be called netbooks, they went by the series PowerBook 100 and they were very small laptops with a docking station. The most popular was probably the PowerBook 2300 Duo. It was a top-of-class machine in it’s day. I remember a pretty big friend of mine who was so bold as to use it on the subway. No body would mess with him anyway, but it was such a well designed full featured sub-notebook. History repeats itself, it happened when Nintento took over the “dead” console market, now it’s happening as Asus reanimates the mini laptop concepts of yester-year.
MDN Magic Word: pattern — a good choice!
Ha. I have a macbook, and both wireless keyboard and mouse. I connect my macbook to my den’s TV, and websurf from my sofa. I use 1024 x 600 resolution, which is very comfortable to me (I’m farsighted)
tablet?
MacBook Touch?
iSlate? Aha, I think I mentioned that before – oh yes, back in 2006! Time flies.
“Comment from: Macaday Mar 20, 06 – 06:52 pm
I reckon Apple do need the phone technology because the genuine, ultimate, ALL-IN-ONE product will one day be here.
So the parts of that gizmo they need will be the phone, HDTV output, GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth. Put all that together on an OSX operating system all working beautifully together and with a touchscreen and you have one very cool product that will shake the world. No other manufacturer could come close to making that work, but Apple definitely could.
iSlate. I want one. Within 3 years please Mr Jobs.”
>Jobs … argued instead that the company’s mission was to add more value for customers at current price points
Right. By removing firewire?
Predrag,
I don’t need to disguise my system’s resolution. All I need to do is put it in that resolution.
For example, I have the option of using my MacBook Pro in:
1440×900
1280×800
1024×768
Now, if I connect an external LCD projector I get an even bigger set of resolutions that I can use.
Since my resolution is already set, then all I would need to do is disguise my browser as something like:
Mozilla/5.0 (MacintoshT; X; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_1; en-us) AppleWebKit/625.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.0 Safari/625.20.1
Again, maybe I’m being thick-headed, but this seems like non-news to me.
We all know that Apple has a table somewhere, c’mon the iPhone is just as a small tablet. So the fact that one search engine says that somewhere, one is in use does not mean a thing.
At least it doesn’t to me.
questions answered:
– “Why couldn’t it be a (insert computer name) running OS-X?”
It *could* but we are supposed to believe that the unknown Mr. or Ms. Cool that detected it “knows something” that would disallow this possibility.
– Apple tests lots of prototypes that never see the light of day, why couldn’t it be that?
It *could* but usually those are tested on closed internal networks, the fact that it was tested on the wild Internet usually means it’s a product that is out of the lab, and in the first stages of user testing.
So in short, indications are this is a real leak of a real new product, but we have nothing at all to go on in terms of proof other than the second-hand statement of an anonymous person working at some place we don’t know. (so it could be crap also)
I’m with you….
What does the Dell Mini note or whatever its called show up like, or the EEEEEEEEEPC show up when its loaded with OSX……..
MacWorld is always interesting. I’m just wondering if what’s intended for an ’09 introduction will be spoiled the way the Mac Mini intro was. Jobs intro of the Mini seemed rather uninspired, and I just can’t shake the notion that the Mac Mini was intended to be a classic Jobs “one more thing” announcement. Wasn’t his “one more thing” that year for the iPod? The iPod?? C’mon!
I would like to see some sort of Apple home theater appliance. A cross between a Mini and an TV – less computer than a Mini, but more computer than an TV.
Will it happen? I can always hope, but probably not… that’s why I’m building my own HTMac.
To all those with little minds that could not grasp the idea of an Apple mobile phone before it came out…..and to those very same closed minded people that can not grasp the idea of a larger than iphone mobile product that has greater power and more extensive multi-touch……I only have one thing to say.
M A C T O U C H F T W ! ! ! ! ! ! ! 1 1 1 😀
They already have those. They aren’t official apple products but they are called modbooks
I read this article completely on the topic of the comparison of most up-to-date and earlier technologies, it’s amazing article.
In fact no matterr if someone doesn’t be aware of
then its up to other people that they will assist,
so here it occurs.