these days. Everybody but Apple.
The closest thing Apple has is the Macbook Air. it is essentially a
high performance Netbook with Niger screen memory and battery life.
Unfortunately the price is also bigger. A lot bigger. About 400% bigger.
In other words you can buy up to 4 netbooks for the price of even the
most basic Macbook Air.
The Netbooks are so cheep, they even cost less than the HDD to SSD
upgrade option for the Macbook Air
So what is Apple player in this Market.
Just looking at the prices, the closest thing Apple has is the iPod
Touch. Granted, Apple will introduce a new model shortly but it's
Internet experience is totaly different.
The next closest thing is the Macbook at $1100. But that is a full
features notebook and is also due for a refresh.
There are two possibilities for Apple to compete with the $300-$500
Netbooks.
The First is to introduce the long anticipated MacTable. I hope that
happened but it's all rumours at this point.
The next best thing for Apple is to offer similar features to the
netbooks in a existing product.
How about a Macbook Air with the following coppnents:
Processor: Atom vs Core 2 Duo
Memory: 1GB@533 vs 2GB@667
Disk: 16GB SSD vs 80GB HDD
Graphics: Intel 950 vs X3100
This component change will surely bring the price down by a few
hundred dollars and increase battery life significantly. Weight will
also be decreased slightly.
Also. The Macbook Air was a unique product and came at a somewhat
premium price due to the new technology. That was 6 months ago. Surely
Apple can bring down the cost of all other components
Third, Apple officials have states that the company will be lowering
it's product margins from 35 to 30%. In other words a $1000 product
will now cost $950
All these factors can add up to decreae the price of the Macbook Air
to half of what it is now or about $900
The Macbook Air represents the perfect form factor for a portable
computer and it should not be kept only to bussiness people with the
big wallets.
Sent from my iPhone
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