Apple helped kill off laptops. Will he bring them back?

Rumor has it that Apple is working on Low cost MacBook. And not a “low-cost Mac”, but a decent cheap laptop, maybe as low as $599. For a company that traditionally targets the more premium end of the market, this will be a sea change.

Naturally, Apple takes pride in its design and aesthetics. So the company won’t simply take the internals of a MacBook Air, put them in a cheap plastic case, and be done with it. Instead, Apple is supposed to build a smaller laptop, with a lower-resolution screen and a “completely new design” around the iPhone’s processor.

This chip could be a copy of the A19 found in the current iPhone lineup, but the analyst said Ming Chi Kuo It claimed earlier this year that the company was working on a laptop powered by an A18 processor last year.

If the idea of ​​a small, low-cost laptop running on an ultra-low-power chip sounds familiar, well, it should be – as we used to call it Netbooks. Laptops came on the scene at a strange time in the late 2000s, when we were transitioning to a web-first world of computing.

What sets laptops apart from other portable computers is their pursuit of portability, battery life, and low prices at almost any price. original netbook, ASUS Eee PCcomes in two sizes (7-inch or 10-inch) and runs on the budget Intel Celeron M processor. But even a slow, low-power CPU was too demanding for the Eee mini PC, so ASUS lowered the operating frequency to just 630MHz. (Yes, in the halcyon days of 2007, we measured CPU speed in MHz, not GHz.)

Intel saw this emerging trend and built CPUs specifically for laptops called Atom. In many ways, Atom chips were Intel’s answer to the growing power of ARM, and even formed the basis for its efforts in tablets and smartphones. It’s basically the opposite of what Apple did, which took its A-series mobile processor and turned it into a powerful laptop chip. (And now we’re back again, apparently.)

As we all know by now, laptops were not long for this world. A number of things helped explain their demise. For one thing, most of them were just never Especially good. And the ones that weren’t terrible tended to be a bit expensive. Sure, you can get a 7-inch Eee PC for around $200. But there is something more capable, like HP Mini 210 HDcan cost you around $385 in 2010, depending on configuration. When adjusted for inflation, that’s more than $577. With the prices of regular laptops falling, this doesn’t seem like a particularly good deal anymore.

But two of the biggest culprits are undoubtedly the rise of the Chromebook and the iPad. (We’ll save the Chromebook discussion for another day.) The iPad was introduced in 2010, and it took off immediately He started eating in Netbook market share. By 2012, Tablets have surpassed laptopsBy 2013, laptops had virtually died out. Sure, some of it still lingers, and you had a spiritual successor in the Chromebook, but the iPad helped kill off the netbook in stunning, rapid fashion.

Many things one would once use a laptop for — surfing the web, checking email, shouting into the void of what was then called Twitter — are now better handled by an iPad. When paired with a Bluetooth keyboard, the iPad was actually a pretty good productivity machine, as long as your expectations were low.

Thus, the netbook disappeared.

But the new, cheaper MacBook, at least on paper, looks like it might borrow a bit from the laptop’s blueprint. Some people will never be able to adapt to the workflow of a tablet and keyboard combo. So maybe Apple will give them the right form factor for a laptop.

Although we don’t know the size of the screen, we do know that it will be smaller than the current 13.6-inch MacBook Air. That might mean 13.3 inches, but maybe Apple will bring the screen back 12 inch format Or even reconsider 11 inches World’s smallest antenna model. This is approaching netbook territory.

Pair all that with a mobile-first SoC that’ll handle everyday tasks and browsing with aplomb, but certainly won’t do the trick for heavier tasks like video editing or gaming, and you’ve got something that looks like the original ballpark of a laptop if you ask me. Apple obviously won’t call its new affordable MacBook a netbook, but maybe it could make it by avoiding the name Cool again.