Apple to Netbooks: Drop Dead

Jason Snell reads the tea leaves on Tim Cook’s comments from today’s quarterly conference call regarding “netbooks”. Here’s a quote from Cook:

“For us, it’s about doing great products. And when I look at what is being sold in the netbook space today, I see cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens, and just not a consumer experience… that we would put the Mac brand on, quite frankly. And so it’s not a space, as it exists today, that we’re interested in, nor do we believe that customers in the long term would be interested in.”

Whatever they’re cooking up for this space, it will not be a Mac. I’m thinking iPhone OS (perhaps renamed) and a touchscreen keyboard. (There must be some reason why the keyboard in iPhone OS 3.0 now appears to be rescaled dynamically — i.e. rendered resolution independently.)

★ Wednesday, 22 April 2009