I really like Apple laptops. For that matter, I even like Mac OS X. But what I can’t stand is that they no longer have a 12-inch professional-grade laptop, and don’t appear to have one planned. This seems to be the result of an amateurish segmentation effort on Apple’s part, reflective of their focus on the consumer and their business focus on the freelancer or one-or-two-person shop, rather than providing products that might satisfy a larger shop or enterprise.

One explanation I hear is that they aren’t able to fit the components into a smaller form factor. This might have some legs if it weren’t belied by a comparison of the two other models specifications. In each, the larger laptop gets better components - a larger harddrive, a faster optical reader, etc. There is no space difference or significant heat difference between these components.

The only reason I can imagine Apple having this differentiation is because it thinks that as people move up the spending ladder, they will want more screenspace. This makes sense if you work in a coffee shop or out of your home, but doesn’t make any sense if you have a beautiful 30-inch Cinema display at your office (or 24-inch, in our case)!

My ideal computer: the smallest form factor, a decent processor, a ton of RAM, very little hard-drive space (I use our fileserver) and I’m good to go. We’re apparently beyond Apple’s target market because we use our laptops as business people, not as freelancers.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 10th, 2006 at 9:18 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can trackback from your own site.