What Apple Won't Do

by Jordan Yerman | October 15, 2008 at 08:19 am

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New notebooks from Apple! Let the fanboys/girls rejoice. However, most interesting thing about this rollout was what is not in Apple's development pipeline: Blu-ray support, touch-screen notebooks, and netbooks.

Perhaps Jobs' most puzzling or awkward comment during Tuesday's event was regarding what is assumed to be the standard in high-definition packaged media. Regarding Blu-ray, Jobs described it as "a bag of hurt." He expanded, saying that he meant that not from a consumer experience perspective, but that the licensing is expensive and complex. Apple apparently plans to take a wait-and-see approach after Blu-ray has been in the market awhile.

This makes some sort of sense, really: Apple is working on proprietary media rollout of its own, so it's eschewing the proprietary media rollouts of others. The Apple TV, which began life as a glorified coffee-mug warmer with no compelling functionality, could end up as a sort of Slingbox/TiVo for iTune-supplied hi-def content. Depending on how quick the holiday-season uptake of Blu-ray is, we can expect some shift in this product-development stance.

Another ain't-gonna-happen, according to Jobs, is the touch-screen interface for Mac notebooks:

Apple is one of the leaders in implementing touch screens in its devices--the iPhone, the iPod Touch--and using them in innovative ways. And while Jobs admitted that his company has looked into it, it's passing on making a notebook version of Hewlett-Packard's TouchSmart PC, the desktop with a touch-screen monitor.

Multi-touch input via the trackpad is a lot more workflow-friendly than removing one's hand from the keyboard and rubbing up against the screen, particularly if you're using an external keyboard.

Touch-screen enhancement was not ruled out for desktop machines, though: the iMac seems almost predesigned for this feature.

Also, Apple will be keeping its upmarket image intact by eschewing netbooks, those cheap and underpowered laptops meant just for LOLcats and Google Docs:

While he certainly left some room to change his mind, he didn't sound excited about the category at all. And the company might be timid about getting into the Netbook market since its attempts at the smaller, cheaper Mac Mini weren't that well received, said Baker of NPD.

"They did a Nettop (a desktop version of a Netbook) and it wasn't particularly successful, if you think about the Mac Mini as a precursor to Nettops," he said.

Again, not too surprising: when the Macbook was first introduced, I was working at an Apple-centric computer shop, and those low-end Macbooks gathered dust as their more-powerful cousins flew out the door on wings of design-forward white plastic. Mac stuff ain't cheap, and I don't predict too many users paying double the price of a PC for a machine that's just meant to drive a web browser.

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