Apple Takes New Netbook Position

Apple unveiled a number of new updates to its MacBook lineup at its WWDC conference on Monday, including a new 13-inch MacBook Pro for $1,199. But the new 13-inch model, while compact, doesn't quite touch the $399 to $599 price points of what the market typically refers to as netbooks.

According to Todd Benjamin, director of portables for Apple, a MacBook can author a DVD, author a photo book, "anything you want to do," he said in an interview.

Netbooks typically lack features like slot-loading DVD drives, and are typically designed for content consumption. By contrast, Macs author content. "They don't have the things that you want to do on the Mac, which is make amazing things," Benjamin said.

Previously, Apple has framed the question in terms of cost and quality. "We don't know how to make a $500 computer that's not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that," Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said, implying then that the iPhone could fit the bill.

And, with the addition of video recording to the iPhone 3G S platform, the iPhone gained more of those content-creation capabilities. But the iPhone still lacks features like the iLife suite, which the Macintosh platform also includes.

Benjamin also explained that the reason the MacBook Pro is dropping the ExpressCard slot (with the exception of the 17-inch model) has more to do with the success of USB as a peripheral bus than ExpressCard. Basically, most if not all of the specialized devices that have previously used the ExpressCard format now use the USB bus, he said.

But Apple also chose to build in an SD slot rather than include a five-in-one card readers, as others have done. The reason? The SD card format has become "ubiquitous," Benjamin said.

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