The Fake MacBook Nano makes us want an Apple netbook even more!
I know it’s never going to happen, or at least, Steve Jobs will do his damnedest to make sure such a product never sees the light of day, but I’ll be damned if I don’t really want a Mac netbook like one of these.
Gizmodo posted these pictures of what is likely an MSI Wind modded into a shiny new MacBook Nano. It’s obviously fake, but probably not very far from what Apple could come up with. So why don’t they?
Simply because they won’t make enough money off of them.
Of course Steve Jobs says that they don’t know how to make a cheap laptop that isn’t “a piece of junk”, but what that really means is, we dont know how to make a cheap laptop that isn’t a piece of junk that we still make a 50% profit on. If Apple has been consistent on one thing since the return of Steve Jobs well over 10 years ago, it’s that they won’t release a product unless they are absolutely sure that they will be able to make a serious profit margin on it.
Even Apple’s iPhone 3g which retails for $199 makes Apple a serious profit margin, it’s just that we don’t really pay it. AT&T does. It’s rumored that AT&T pays Apple $399-499 for each iPhone 3g and then subsidizes it to the price we see today.
Apple doesn’t want to cannibalize the sales of it’s wildly-successful MacBook line with a line of laptops which at the $500-700 price range, would be of serious interest to average consumers. Not to mention the fact that the sub-optimal performance of OS X on an Atom based netbook would hurt the user experience, something we know Apple is NEVER interested in doing.
So what WILL show up in that open $500-$700 slot in Apple’s product line? I have a feeling that we’ll find out the answer to that question in January at MacWorld.