Apple to retain, redesign plastic MacBook family - Page 3

The white MacBook is a design classic, and to this day, is still one of my all-time favourite Macs!

The snow white Mac's sell well because of their clean, smooth, white porcelain looks. Women and kids love them.


Johnathan Ive used to design toilets before becoming Steve jobs best friend and designer.

Here in the UK, a white MB is £749, and an entry MBP is £899.

At those price points, Apple is still a more expensive purchase, especially for a potential switcher who can get a whole lot of notebooks for £500 or less. While I don't expect Apple to produce a netbook, neither do I see a tablet as an alternative fill in product. I think Apple would do really well with a MB priced at £5-600 point, without sacrificing their brand values. Then knock a further £50 of the entry MBP and the range sits well in price.

The market this would open to Apple would be huge, as consumers are now able to get a lot of hardware for considerably less than the Apple entry price point. Sure, none of it may be as good, but for a huge number of consumers... it's good enough.

The mini needs price adjustment too. Here in the UK the 2GB model hits the store at an unimpressive £649. Far too expensive. They need to get the range starting at £399 at least. There is a need for a headless macintosh, but the last revamp pushed the UK price too high.

Yeah, make them lighter; kids carry them, not Governors.

The last line isn't really helping. In the past, I think I've referred to the color as "institutional white" in the pejorative sense. I hadn't found much information on his job designing toilets, but that explains both versions of the iBook.

How do you know if they're best friends?

That's fine as an evolution over the years. But they can't simply just make it smaller, otherwise they would. Everything would be miniscule.

This technological progress is no good when it comes to offering the same performance, today, in a smaller package at the same price.


Yes, the key being they couldn't offer that a year earlier because it wasn't possible.
BTW... I'm hoping Apple replaces my iPhone friday.... it is certainly MUCH shorter battery life but perhaps a fault.


You're saying that Apple should use smaller/slower processors, but overclock them, to get equivalent performance? I think that would be a Applecare nightmare....


I'm sorry, I just don't buy that Intel is artificially slowing down their processors.... that they could have been much faster at the same cost and price. I'm happy to accept Intel will make as much money as they can.... just not the rest.


The iPhone does things that were impossible a couple of years ago. Is it really realistic to be able for us to say whether the price is realistic?

Fortunately - competition from Nokia, Palm etc helps to keep these things in line. Along with competition between AMD/Intel/ARM of course.


I just don't want a carrier at all. I understand how much that really costs! I already pay for a phone and data plan, let me tether my laptop or tablet to my phone. Tethering works great on the iPhone already.


I would like to see a tablet designed to run without net connection, seamlessly taking advantage when connections drift by to update caches, send/get mail, etc. It seems that everyone builds for either connected or standalone - rarely a combination.

But I think a good syncing system and online connections mean we can get by with 16GB too... unless it's a HD video device.

You want carrier choice and a price drop?

I can go into any local mobile carrier and get the iPhone 3GS, unlocked, but the price will be £700 (or $1,138!) I don't think your view on what a realistic market price is quite matches Apple's.

Why are you berating me? My talk of NVIDIA was not in reference to their 9400m GPUs, which are integrated with the motherboard and do not produce excessive heat. It was in reference to their GTS 150 card, which is not integrated, large, and requires much more heat dissipation capabilities. Even more so with an ATI 4850. I haven't been able to find a tear down of a high-end 24" iMac that sports either one of these to see how Apple fits the suckers in there (plus a heat sink and fan, mind you), hence my curiosity. I do have an idea how much custom cards cost, since all 3rd party manufacturers' graphics cards are customized in some way or other from the reference designs of NVIDIA or ATI (from the enclosure, to the heat sink & fan, all the way down to what type of capacitors are used). To suggest otherwise indicates you do not have knowledge of how graphics cards are manufactured. Whether it is "custom" in physical form or the BIOS, it's still a custom card. EVGA is one of the few 3rd party manufacturers out there that offers an NVIDIA 285 for Mac, and that card goes for $100 more than the exact same PC version, which isn't terribly surprising or different in terms of price, IMO. Also, iMacs do not use identical boards and chipsets as PCs. Graphics chipsets, yes. But look at the 20" iMac tear down over at iFixIt and tell me how any of those components (especially the logic board) are the same as what you would find inside a PC.

Sarcasm, my friends.

-Clive

Well played.

I don't believe that, I think the new MacBook will be the tablet.

Well not very a tablet but a macBook without keyboard, but with a multitouch screen. So a MacBook with two screen.

That's it

Apple has been slow to push prices down. No one can deny that.

They decided to wait and see how their lineup stood up to the recession and only react if sales tanked. As sales have stood up pretty well up to this point, all they done is inch prices down (when compared to competitors) and reconfigure certain products. This is logical up to a point but IMO they have missed a golden opportunity (pre Windows 7) to gain market share by pushing prices further down and entering the netbook market.

Apple could easily produce a netbook that wasn't 'junk' (in Steve Jobs terminology) for $499. And I mean really easily, so SJ isn't to be believed on that one. There are other reasons why Apple doesn't want to get into the netbook world (at least yet).

Apple has been fortunate in that sales have held up rather well and no doubt the ability to put OSX on some netbooks without major issues is a good thing for some users too.

Netbook market share isn't really worth having from Apples perspective, given the low profit margins. I would anticipate the mythical tablet to be Apples attempt to snag netbook buyers, however the tablet will be priced higher than a netbook to get it into the profit margin range that Apple is comfortable at. They will be able to do that because it will be a tablet, not a netbook.

IMO Apple could squeeze a healthly margin out of a $500 netbook and use it as another stepping stone to get people to switch and give established mac users the option of a super compact runaround machine.

There are many PC users that balk at Apple's current pricing for laptops but that might be willing to go for an Apple netbook as a first taste of the apple. It's clear there is a market for netbbooks.

1. If your aim is Keynote and Powerpoint presentations - wait until an app is available for the iPhone/iPod Touch; in the meantime, turn all of your slides into photos, create an album and run a manually advanced slideshow. Video out is already on today's iPhones and iPod Touches.

2. The MacBook Air is not "too heavy" by any stretch of the imagination.

Blasphemy!

Edit: Fine, you want to stop typing?

Get a MacBook Wheel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

+1. It's nice seeing the white plastic being carried on to the iPhones ( 3G/3GS ). Cracking is not a nice thing though.. \

It's Jonathan Ive, not Johnathan. And if you say that, I guess some people are using Toiletbooks ...

So now Macs become more affordable and people buy it, only to complain that for such a price they could buy a better PC with more stuff. All BS ( Not the poster ). A PC is incomparable to a Mac. It's like comparing a Mercedes to a Toyota. 2 different leagues. 1 is set apart by design, high quality, thus premium-priced while another is for the masses and has significantly lower quality and not so stellar design. Apple has never targeted for large marketshare, but it's products are so stellar people want them and pay through the roof for them, thus increasing marketshare for Apple. Price chops are good,but not too much IMO.

This would get a MacBook/MacBook Pro user near the ever-increasing Netbook price range and save Mac users some weight when lugging things around.

Wow, so they make the MacBook Air plastic and even smaller and the price is cut in two? Funny that. You're sort of not thinking that one through.

I need one! Now!

Very good point.


I disagree. The emphasis on the MacBook Air design was on the appearance of thin more than on actually thin and not at all on small or lightweight. I would much prefer a MacBook Air that was smaller and lighter -- if not quite so thin looking. A lot of weight and bulk was added to achieve the very thin tapered edges.

A lot of weight to make the tapered edges? I doubt the taper adds much weight, maybe a couple ounces, thin aluminum doesn't weigh much. Besides, the way the edges curve, it might have allowed the shell to be made thinner.

A couple of ounces is 5-10%. I would have preferred my MacBook Air to be a couple of ounces lighter, a couple of centimeters smaller across the diagonal, and of uniform 15-19 millimeter thickness, rather than the aesthetically gorgeous tapered design.

Anyway, the real killer for me that required me to trade my MacBook Air for a unibody MacBook was the need for 4GB of ram. I despise having to lug around an optical drive which belongs in the 20th century. I've never, ever used the damned optical drive and would have been happy to connect the external optical drive which I bought for the MacBook Air (and have never, ever used) to install Snow Leopard.

As soon as Apple offer a laptop with 4GB and no optical drive, I'm buying one regardless of other specs.

Making a couple ounces into "a lot of weight" stretches the credibility. While the taper seems not so ideal, making such a big fuss about the little bit of weight and size it is on the absurd side.

I think he has thought it through and $700 to $800 bucks is just about right. Especially if you consider what you get in AIR. Apple should be able to put together a functional machine, actually more functional, in that price range. If they could get Intel to change their marketing restrictions on ATOM they could go even lower. In a real sense the tech is already there just that companies are not free to use it.

I bring up ATOM because of it's current low power profile but intel has other low power chips coming that would do the job very well when the price comes down. There are a lot of ways to a quality $700 laptop, the problem isn't with Apple but rather Intel.




Dave

I think it's hilarious that you and others think White is somehow a color for girls and kids. I guess all those rappers that drive around in white SUVs are just a bunch of girly men. If you wear white underwear, do you buy them at Victoria's Secret? Are any of the walls in your house painted white?

White, like Black, is a completely neutral color. Assigning a gender to those colors is laughable.

Is it possible for the white MacBook to use a platic white unibody?

Should be easier to make than the aluminium, would look good, but would it be strong?

Same here. I don't see any gender problems with choosing black or white.

Why does everyone want multi-colored Apple stuff? It makes it look extremely cheap like those China toys. See, now only the iPod Nano is available on many colors. What about the rest?

Thought about the "tablet" design and how it might be sold again today... if anything, I think it might, MIGHT be possible they extend the iPod touch line to include larger versions... one optimized for magazine/newspaper/textbook-format reading, one slightly smaller for video (which would be somewhere between the current size and the larger format)... could breathe entirely new life into the whole iPod lineup. The would eliminate the re-branding issue (iTablet? yecchhh!) and extend the line to fill the gaps being created by Kindle and the like.

So, there could be a re-segmenting of product, thusly...

-iPod touch reader (for example)
-iPod touch video (for example)
-iPod touch
-Pod classic
-iPod nano
-iPod shuffle

No... (5 chars)

Who are twitboy and twitgirl? ... is this a Twitter-based story series?

I was wondering if someone would spot that. If it was a twitter based story series that would have been very funny lol. Actually they are two twitter services I just launched (both dot COMs) with matching twitter accounts. I once had this idea, bla bla bla...

Actually, that weight ("a lot?" seriously?) was added to make the shell rigid and flex-proof. If you take away the tapers, you have a much less robust case--unless you add even more weight back on to reinforce it.

The looks are just icing on the cake.

If you look at iFixIt's 20" teardown, you can see a small gap right above the CPU heatsink. The older iMacs (ATI Radeon HD 2000 series) had a second heatsink there, which connected to a small sub-board which contained the GPU, attaching to a small peripheral slot (similar to a RAM slot) on the underside of the board. The discrete cards in the 24" iMac use a very similar graphics sub-card, while the 9400M is simply grafted to the logic board itself. When that second heatsink is installed with the GPU, it sits in-line with the CPU heatsink, allowing the CPU fan to dissipate both at once.

Here's a picture of the GT130 used in the iMac 24" (click for larger image):



I work at an Apple Authorized Service Provider, in case you're wondering how I know this.

That's called a MXM card, by the way, and there are several standard sizes.

I hope Apple doesn't go back to plastic notebooks. The aluminum unibody notebooks are fine. Apple <> Dell.

Ahh, that I was not aware of. I've only really worked on Apple hardware, and they don't label it as such.