THE SMALL MACS

The whispers are growing loud lately. Have you heard them?

“These machines will have a scaled-down version of Mac OS and use flash drives in place of hard drives.”

“touchscreen MacBook (tablet). It would, in theory be dubbed the MacBook touch.”

“Dow Jones and others report rumors that Taiwanese makers are preparing to ship a 10″ Apple netbook in the second half of 2009. Speculation is that these will be touch-screen equipped machines.”

“I take this to mean that we will soon be seeing 12 and 17 inch MacBook Pro machines.”

As you can see, these, ahem, rumors are all over the place.

But I know what the Small Macs really are.

Apple already has a Small Mac. So, probably do you. They already have been selling in the millions. What are they, you ask?

The Small Macs are the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

Think about it.

These tiny hand-held Apple computers are elegant, powerful, very useful and completely addictive. These are the very terms we have used to describe the Macintosh, right? I don’t know about you, but my iPhone has almost completely taken the place of my trusty and beloved Powerbook G4, and my languishing iMac.

The only thing I can’t do well on my iPhone is write a long article – like this one. Perhaps Apple is planning another addition to the iPhone/iPod Touch. One that is a little bigger, which might have a keyboard or a way to connect a wireless keyboard to it.

If I were Apple, and I were going to do something like this, I would not play follow-the-leader with some netbook or tablet thing. Nope. I would make something very new, and sell it as such.

Imagine it. Miiniature Macs, all shiny in glass, black and sliver. Coveted objects of instant technical lust. A complete new genre of Mac/iPhone, complete with touch screen, a hybrid of iPhone and OS X software, which is able to run both Mac software and iPhone Apps.

I would probably call them Small Macs.

Sorry, no refunds.
Void where prohibited.
Your mileage may vary.
Film at 11.

Roger Born

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