Mac Wind – The Apple Netbook from Sascha Pallenberg on Vimeo.
Here’s an informative video by Sascha Pallenberg, conducting a brief interview with a chap who’s got OS X Leopard running on his MSI Wind netbook.
I’ve heard a lot about OS X on the Wind, but this is the first chance I’ve had to actually see it in action. And I confess, I’m impressed. OK, it’s taken this guy a little bit of hacking around to get the machine working smoothly like this (with all the extras like wifi, webcam, and volume controls working properly) – but the end result looks worth the hassle.
As m’learned friend Ed Sutherland pointed out in an earlier post, Apple is determined not to jump headlong into the netbook market; not without taking a long, hard look at what it’s jumping into.
Apple wants to make computers that don’t suck, and I think one of Apple’s defining attributes of suckiness is a tiny keyboard and a tiny screen. That’s why the Air is the size it is. It’ll take a considerable change of heart at Apple to produce something as small as a Wind.
But that doesn’t mean Apple isn’t working on something to compete with all the netbooks.
I believe the MacBook Air is the model for what’s coming. It started out as an incredibly expensive notebook computer, but in time I think future versions of it will be incredibly cheap. They, too, will forego things like an optical drive and a user-replaceable battery and a whole bunch of ports and connectors.
These Airs-to-come won’t be as cheap as most netbooks. But they’ll be good value nonetheless.
They will be what Steve Jobs alluded to last year: a low-cost computer that doesn’t suck.
Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He also writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. You can find out more at his website, and follow him on Twitter @gilest.
