Tomor­row is the infa­mous Mac­world keynote. More than likely a new Mac will be intro­duced. As the date slowly approaches, the rumor mill has been buzzing about a poten­tial prod­uct name called Air—Mac­book Air, AirBook, what have you. Of note, is that there was con­fir­ma­tion that Apple had ordered a bunch of 13″ screens. Now, 13″ screens are cer­tainly on the large side when it comes to screen real estate even if a note­book comes in under 4 lbs. Per­son­ally I think it needs to have small dimen­sions, not just be light­weight to be con­sid­ered an ultra­portable. You can’t exactly slip a 13″ note­book as eas­ily as a eeePC into your (man) purse. There’s also the fact that the stan­dard Mac­Book looks so out of place with its brethren right now, even if it got a token hard­ware refresh a few months ago. Per­son­ally, I’m hedg­ing my bets that the new Mac­book will most likely be just a redesigned Mac­book and will be a step­ping stone for design queues to move up into the Pro line. I’m not the only one who thinks this. (Oth­ers spec­u­late that it may turn out to be an iTouch-esque tablet.) It’ll cer­tainly be lighter, faster, and every inch as beau­ti­ful as the other alu­minum SKUs, but cer­tainly no eeePC matchup. Imag­ine Apple putting out a $500–600 sub­note­book. Would that can­ni­bal­ize Mini sales? Prob­a­bly not. As the eeePC has shown, niche mar­kets can work. But still, would Apple even shoot for that price point? And if you can’t wait for Apple to come out with a sub­note­book (assum­ing one isn’t announced tomor­row), you could always hack your eeePC to run Mac OS X.

One Response to “Will The New Mac Be An Ultraportable?”

  1. Linden LAN » Blog Archive » Apple Fell Too Far From The Tree This Time said on January 15th, 2008 at 2:25 pm:

    […] the keynote has come and gone. My pre­dic­tion like many oth­ers didn’t pan out as expected. The Mac­Book Air is yet one of Apple’s many […]