In Defense of an A-Series MacBook

Don’t call it a netbook: Apple’s rumored A-series MacBook isn’t just a great idea, it could revitalize the Mac by being truly competitive with the sweet spot of the PC market.
🍎 Apple, netbooks, and what-ifs
Apple almost made a netbook.

This low-cost line of Linux- based PCs revitalized the PC market at a time when Windows Vista was dragging it down, setting off a cascading series of events that would forever change the industry. It forced Microsoft to keep Windows XP around in Starter Edition form as a low-cost, comparatively low-resource alternative to Vista. It triggered a rush to the bottom—in pricing and quality—that undermined PC maker profits and reset customer expectations. And it made Apple, which had just released the first iPhone, blink.

As described in the official Steve Jobs biography, Apple’s former CEO gathered his executive team together in 2007 to brainstorm a response to the netbook. The obvious choice was to simply ape what PC makers were doing and throw together a low-end Mac laptop. Such a thing would cost more than PC-based netbooks, but less than its entry-level MacBook, which started at $1099.

But Jony Ive asked why this machine needed a keyboard hinged to the screen, reviving Jobs’s pre-iPhone dream of a tablet. And so Apple set out to design and build what would become the iPad. When Jobs introduced the iPad in early 2010, Microsoft had just shipped Windows 7, which had been stripped down enough to support netbooks. And so he did what Steve Jobs did and crapped all over Microsoft’s aspirations despite having almost gone down that road himself.

“If there’s going to be a third category of devices [in addition to phones and laptop], it’s going to have to be better at these kinds of tasks than a laptop or smartphone,” Jobs said at the iPad launch, having just listed several common computing activities. “Some people have thought that’s a netbook. The problem is, netbooks aren’t better at anything! They’re slow, they have low-quality displays, and they run clunky old PC software. So they’re no better than a laptop at anything, they’re just cheaper. They’re just cheap laptops.”

The iPad wasn’t the only major Apple product introduction in 2010, of course. Apple also shipped its second-generation MacBook Air that year, and this is the model with the iconic design everyone remembers. This MacBook Air came in both 13.3- and 11-inch models, and the latter was as close as Apple would ever get to a netbook, with its tiny form factor and $999 starting price. It was discontinued in 2015, and Apple then offered a more premium 12-inch MacBook that started at $1299. Of course, by this point, Jobs was long gone. And Apple had also bulked out its tablet lineup with Mini, Air, and Pro models in addition to the standard iPad.
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