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How About an iPhone OS Or Android-Based Netbook?
perlow (Jason Perlow of ZDNet) suggests that the current crop of netbooks might be missing the boat when it comes to getting maximum battery life and small-screen usability, and asks "Could Mac OS X iPhone or Google's Android be the key to mass adoption of the next generation of netbooks?" Android looks pretty nice, I admit, but so far I like having full-fledged Ubuntu on my own small computer. He's not the first one to think that the iPhone would be well-employed as the guts of an ultra-portable, though. (Note: it's only a model.)
Netbooks are popular because they run the software that people are used to. No converting of data files, no learning of new user interfaces. Everything you know, just on a small device with a battery life that is enough for a day.
Cellphone technology based "laptops" have existed for years, and they have a solid fan base, but they are still big cellphones, not small PCs.
The distinction may go away as the web replaces desktop applications, but that requires fast, reliable and affordable network access, IOW: not yet.
He's not the first one to think that the iPhone would be well-employed as the guts of an ultra-portable, though.
If Apple manufactures is, not on your life. I don't want to have to jailbreak the thing at each update, or be denied the right to run this or that on it.
I think the success Asus has had with the EeePC doesn't come so much from the PC's form factor or scale, as from the fact that it's ... just a PC, i.e. an open platform that doesn't require people to buy special software, and lets them run whatever they want on it. PDAs these days are powerful enough to do almost the same, but depending on the manufacturer, it can be a breeze, or a pain in the butt, to develop and run applications on them.
Come to think of it, this issue of openness (i.e. letting people do what they want without corporate greediness and power-freaking getting in the way) is what defines successful things from unsuccessful ones. MP3 for example is an open format, just look at the MP3 players industry now. PCs are essentially an open design, and it's been flourishing for decades, to the point that it's so entrenched that it gets in the way of better designs. On the other hand, ebooks for example are a dismal failure, because people have to jump through hoops (and pay dearly for the privilege of jumping) to get DRM-encumbered files that won't be readable on other devices.
One point to note here is that Smartphones of today are the "ultra-portables" of a couple of years ago, the laptops of about 5 years ago and the desktops of 8 years ago. The power of the devices is equivalent to what many modern OSes were developed upon, so the issue when looking at OSX(iPhone), Android or Symbian is purely on its better battery efficiency and better small scale UI.
Personally I'd add Symbian to the list as the old Psion 5mx and 7 were in effect the netbooks and ultra-portables of their time and Nokia have some tablet devices at the moment. Combined with the touch screen interfaces, especially the "drag" widescreen display that Android and the iPhone have, gives a robust, low power, operating platform with the added benefits of an easy to use set of installers.
So maybe the question isn't so much whether this is a good plan, but what marketing, software suites and public perception pieces are preventing these mobile OSes (mainly Symbian at this stage) being the default.
But one thing that isn't preventing them is the power of the devices, I'm continually stunned at the multi-processor power of my humble "mobile phone", for most people a netbook with the same processor as my phone (iPhone) but a bigger screen would be perfectly okay and easier to use for their core tasks (email, internet browsing, minor games).
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
You said it very well. It is really just the convergence of the cell phone and PC. I'd prefer the mostly open hardware and software flexibility of the PC wins over the locked down "just works" option of the cell phone. If we want to grow the netbook up from a phone maybe the OpenMoko platform would be a better bet?
How about I pound nails with a wrench instead? It would be about the same thing.
Use the right tool for the right job. Keep the cellphone OSes on phones.
Talk about Redundant Redundancy Overkill. You'd get better performance making a native app then running it in the small devices browser.
This obsession with making everything in a browser so it's cross platform etc. etc. is stupid on small devices and especially using technologies where whole segments of the market doing adhere to standards.
MP3 for example is an open format, just look at the MP3 players industry now. PCs are essentially an open design, and it's been flourishing for decades
First off the PC wasn't an open design, it was closed but companies did a "whiteroom" re-engineering of the BIOS (something that the DMCA would outlaw today). It became more successful once opened but the original design was very much closed and of course the operating systems that made it successful are pretty much the poster child of the closed software movement. The other example you give which is MP3 isn't really open either (otherwise why would there be Ogg?).
So Openness can be a good thing, but your examples are in fact more examples of how closed works commercially as long as it develops an established market.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Since it's basically just MacOS X under the hood. Apple would probably just have to install most of the OSX desktop APIs and provide some tweaks to the app launcher interface that the iPhone uses. However, I think the biggest incentive for them to not do this would be the perception that their product doesn't multitask which would be a turn off to some people.
I think its likely that any touchscreen tablet from Apple would more or less simply be a larger version of the iPhone/Touch, but with similar hardware on the inside. This would have several huge advantages for Apple in terms of a business model.
Something like a 7 inch iPod Touch would provide most of the same functionality as a netbook, but have the advantage of a built in App store that Apple already tightly controls and has a monopoly on. The digital keyboard would save space and size, but a screen twice as large as the current iPhone/Touch would allow for greater usability. Such a product also follows with Job's claim that the iPhone is already a netbook.
I think any Apple entry into the Netbook market would rely heavily on the iPhone OS, especially since the whole idea over the iPhone OS is that its really, deep down at its core, Mac OS.
Heavily crippled. One thing is to be the full OSX, another is to have a small subset of features. Furthermore, you cannot run any program written for OSX in the iPhone. To me that's enough to say that the iPhone-OSX is not the same as OSX.
Mac OS X for the iPhone actually has a rather large subset of features that the desktop version has. The thing is that most of the features in common are under the hood and not in the UI. It's the UI that is largely different and it pretty much has to be considering the size differences of the displays and the huge differences in input methods.
As far as running programs written for the desktop version on the iPhone, it wouldn't take much effort on either Apple's or a developers end to get that to happen. The API for both targets is extremely similar, if you code using MVC as Apple recommends then you should have your code pretty much all set to work on the iPhone or the desktop, your model and most of your controller code will stay the same and most of the differences will be in the view. Make two targets with code covering the appropriate differences in the API and you should easily be able to make two versions of your app, one for the iPhone and one for the desktop. You might even be able to do it as a fat binary so one app package works on either platform but I wouldn't see the point in that.
All this is moot anyways, my point is that Mac OS X has all the technology needed to be run as a slimmed-down version which can run on a netbook. All it needs is the appropriate device drivers, a bit of tweaking to make sure everything plays nice, compile it for the new CPU (if needed), and it sould be all set. It's not like Apple is using two radically different operating systems between the desktop and the iPhone, they are simply modified versions of each other. A third target for the netbook would be pretty easy to accomplish with a versitile OS like Mac OS X.
If Apple used a CPU that had a close enough instruction set to what Mac OS X currently runs on then applications wouldn't need any work to run on a netbook like this. Of course if the CPU was different enough then the developers would have to at least recompile their code for the new CPU but that's no biggie so long as they kept to Apple's APIs.
Sapere aude!
Considering that Mac OS X famously runs slow as molasses on anything with less than 2 GB of RAM, you'd have a hard time finding a desktop that runs it "well" with 1 GB of RAM in the first place.
Anyone saying that Mac OS X needs at least 2 GB of RAM to run decently is flat-out wrong. Unless you're running some pretty intense memory hog applications Mac OS X runs perfectly with anything above around 640 MB. Below that it does start to creak along at points but it will actually run OK down to 256 MB if you don't do much more than word processing and web browsing (the only activities that most normal use their computer for). I don't recommend running with less than 512 MB at a minimum.
Yes, if you have 2 GB of RAM Mac OS X will happily keep everything it sees in memory which will speed load times of a lot of things but unless you're doing hard-core gaming, database, audio, or video manipulation you really won't see an incredible speed difference between 640 MB and 2 GB. Give it a try sometime, I have.
Sapere aude!