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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.
http://openpandora.org/ - can run unbuntu, pocket-sized and a 10 hour battery life = win!
This is a great idea. Laptop users don't need to copy and paste either.
The Chinese can eat with sticks.
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.
So I'll have a big laptop-like device with an incredibly confined proprietary OS I can't change, and that has a tightly controlled application base?
Great! Sign me up! I totally hate how I can run any OS I please, any application I please. I want to have an OS that locks me into using the applications the manufacturer tells me I may use on my hardware!
You know, sarcasm aside, the linux versions of these netbooks have a much higher return rate than the Windows versions. If you make your device around an iPhone, you're looking at the same higher return rate for a confined OS that isn't windows, but you're also disregarding the benefits of an OS that costs about 5 bucks per machine. Basically, you're taking the worst of both worlds, and you don't even have a Windows XP version to sell to the masses when they realise that's what they really want.
It's been a long time.
My Palm Tungsten is a hell of a computer. With the IR keyboard, it serves as a somewhat awkward laptop. It got me to thinking, the only real difference between it and a proper laptop is the screen. Of course, the screen is over half the cost of a laptop so I kind of figured "Ah, that's why we don't see sub-$400 laptops." But then the netbooks came out and I said "well, looks like I called that one wrong."
What we're seeing here are the warring priorities of usage and form factor. If I'm on the go but need the full feature set of a proper desktop, I'm stuck with a laptop. I need the large screen, I need the keyboard and touchpad, I need to run proper PC apps. If I'm really on the go and can't afford to sit down and setup my laptop every time I need to do something, then I really need a PDA-format device. But then there are the situations, usually in businesses, where you end up with weird hybrids of those demands. That's where you see the tablet PC's that are supposed to serve as digital clipboard replacements. There's also the hybrid tablets where you can close the lid like a laptop or turn it around and close it and now you have a tablet PC. Personally, I think those units are just too damn fragile. The old-school blackberries were completely awesome and the biggest part of that was how durable they were. You could take these things into the field and do abuses to them that would make Jack Bauer toss his cookies and they'd still work. There's also a number of businesses that just put a proper desktop PC on a cart and say "haul it where you need it, plug it in when you get there." I've seen that for medical equipment and also inventory systems at warehouse stores.
It pretty much boils down to "how much screen do you need to display what you need to look at" and "how are you inputting information?" At this point, horsepower is pretty much a secondary concern, we can put amazingly powerful computers in little tiny PDA formats. But as powerful as they are, if you need to do a lot of typing, you need a computer. I can read slashdot just fine on a berry but I wouldn't have wanted to thumb-type this post on one.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
Actually, the iPhone OS IS Mac OS X.
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.
The iPhone OS is OSX because Apple "says" it is OSX, it's a real semantic BS thing. While I'm sure there's similarities, in reality the only sameness is the name. Seriously, do you think an old desktop Mac of the same power of the iPhone could actually run OSX?
Yes, I do. Mac OS X is designed to be highly modular and flexible. You might have to make some choices as to what modules to load, what services to keep active, and so on to meet the resource footprint of a slower Mac computer that has less RAM and disk space but at the core it would be the same Mac OS X that runs in an iPhone or a server.
Mac OS X will actually adjust itself to some extent to deal with a low-resource environment. If you take your desktop that runs Mac OS X well with 1 GB of RAM and you take it down to 256 MB of RAM it will still run decently. It'll keep less stuff resident in RAM and it will have to page to disk more often but it will keep running. I've run Mac OS X 10.5 on everything from a 500 MHz G4 machine with 256 MB RAM to a 3 GHz dual quad-core Xenon with 4 GB of RAM. Of course it ran quicker and more smoothly on the machine with more resources but it still ran decently on the old machine.
It's the same Mac OS across all of Apple's products because they all share the same core code. They all run off Darwin, they all use the same modified Mach microkernel, and so on. If you dig into all of the APIs you'll see differences here and there, mostly in the UI API, but even where there are differences the API mirror each other closely. It's the same operating system in far more than just semantics.
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!