billpalmer.net

Come on Apple, where's the MacBook?

Seth over at MacMove stirred up some controversy this week when he more or less suggested that Apple's current laptop lineup is a mess. His whole article is worth a read, but in a nutshell he thinks that Apple blew the whole thing up by moving the fifteen inch PowerBook to an Intel processor while leaving the entire iBook line (and the rest of the PowerBook line) on an aging processor in the form of the G4. Since we all know that all of the remaining G4-based laptops are potentially a heartbeat away from going Intel, they're all currently a bad buy, leaving potential Mac laptop purchasers with only one good choice (the MacBook Pro) whether it happens to suit their needs or not.

Truth is, I largely agree with him, and not just because he happens to be a friend of mine. If I were buying a new Mac laptop today, there is only one model I would look at. But while he sees the MacBook Pro as the problem, I see it as the opposite: thank god we finally have one good laptop model. Beats the pants off of what we had back in 2005, when they all sucked.

Lest someone go and get the wrong idea, let me be clear here: by using words such as "good" and "sucked" to describe the various Mac laptop models, I'm ONLY referring to their speed. But I think back to my quandary in the early part of last year, where my aging 667 Mhz G4 PowerBook was just too slow to keep up with my workflow, and to my disappointment, my only choice was yet another G4-based laptop. I waited as long as I could for the mythical G5 PowerBook, but once we finally got officlal word that we were instead going to Intel and we found out the delayed timeframe for that, I knew there was no way I was going to make it all the way to 2006 before upgrading. Refusing to spend $2000 on a soon-to-be-outdated G4 PowerBook, I instead opted to spend $1000 on a soon-to-be-outdated G4 iBook. If you're going to flush money away on a stop-gap measure, you might as well flush away as little as possible, right?

My penance has been that I've had to live with a twelve inch screen for the past nine months, which has turned out to be not nearly so awkward as I had feared. The whole experience has turned out quite positiviely. The iBook has played exactly the role I intended it to, and now that the Intel-based PowerBook (eh, MacBook Pro) is on the market, I can upgrade whenever I feel like it. The only thing that's holding me back at this point is that the whole twelve inch experiment has gone more positively than I had thought, and so at this point I want to wait for the 12 inch MacBook Pro (if not the 12 inch MacBook) to hit the market, so that I can at least give it a spin in person, before deciding which path to go down.

My situation may not be typical, as I'm currently using a Mac laptop that does the job for me, and while my workflow would undoubtedly benefit from Intel-based speed, it's not crucial at the moment. The kicker, though, is this: if I were to buy a MacBook Pro today, I'd be sellling my current G4 iBook, and I'd get darn good money for it. You want to know why? Because it's the same darn iBook that Apple's still selling today, 1.33 Ghz and all. My iBook is nine months old, and yet it's the current model. If you want a more obvious example, I was chatting a few weeks ago with a former co-worker who bought a G4 iBook two and a half years ago. It was a 1.0 Ghz machine. This is progress?

If you want to explain to me how today's brand new iBook can only be thirty-three percent faster than the iBook of 2003...well, it gives you an idea of just how incredibly unfortunate the whole G4 era turned out to be, at least on the laptop side. It makes me upset just to think about how much potential the whole PowerPC platform had, and how terribly Motorola and IBM managed to alternately botch the whole thing over the years, and how badly it turned out in the end. Seth is right in that Apple's current laptop lineup makes very little sense in terms of the speed of each model (just the fact that the 15 inch model runs four times faster than the more expensive 17 inch model should spell it out clearly enough). But I would argue that having one fast model amongst a bunch of slow ones is preferable to having no fast models at all.

You're probably tempted to worry about sales, though, since everyone knows that only one of Apple's current laptop models is fast. But let me correct you there. Sure, every one of you reading this knows about it. But to the other ninety (if not ninety-nine percent) of the population, Apple's laptop lineup doesn't look any different now than it did back in 2005. If you think I'm underestimating the public, then grab someone off the street at random (current Mac user or otherwise) and quiz them as to which of Apple's laptop models, if any, is currently using an Intel processor. The few people who do actually know what you're talking about will probably incorrectly state that "they all are," while everyone else will just look at you like you're crazy. Point being that even the few folks who walk into an Apple Store armed with knowledge about the move to Intel will probably just assume that every Mac in the store is already Intel-based anyway.

I'm not saying Apple's trying to pull a fast one on anyone, as most of the computing public is so unbelievably misinformed when it comes to personal computers that you could spend the rest of your life trying to set them straight and they still wouldn't get it, so I don't blame Apple for not wanting to put a big green arrow over the Intel Macs and a big red one over the PowerPC-based Macs. But don't think that Apple's decision to keep all the new Intel-based Macs looking identical to their PowerPC-based predecessors was a coincidence or a sign that Jonathan Ive has been on vacation too long. What it really means is that while Apple is perfectly willing to get on TV and tell the world that they're going Intel, they're also hoping that not too large of a percentage of the population figures out that there's a phased transition going on.

All of which is to say that I don't believe that the phased transition is hurting overall sales. Those of us who are deeply enough in the know to time our purchases around the Intel transition are a small enough group such that our direct sales impact is negligible. There is the issue of how many outsiders rely on us for buying advice, but even then you're only relying on a small percentage of the overall picture. Instead, what the phased transition has done is that it's given those of us who are in the know an opportunity to grab on to at least one fast model, if we want to. In my case, the G4 may be wretched slow in comparison to the MacBook Pro, but it still gets the job done. That having been said, it's right about time that Apple hurry up and get the MacBook to market as an iBook replacement, so that those of us who often find ourselves making purchasing recommendations can go back to recommending all of Apple's laptops without hesitation.

Here's a hypothetical for you that perhaps illustrates the point better: if a Windows-using friend of yours was about to buy his next laptop and he was looking at either a G4 iBook or Windows laptop, and the MacBook Pro was out of his budget, and you knew there was no way you could get him to wait for the MacBook to come out...would you encourage him to go ahead and buy the iBook? Keep in mind, the alternative is that he goes ahead and buys another Windows laptop. Tough one, eh?