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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.
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
If Apple got into that product category, I would expect it to be a smaller Mac rather than a larger iPhone. If you check out the teardown pictures of the MacBook Air, you'll see that the motherboard in that machine is very small, certainly small enough for a netbook-type product.
I'm not sure I'd go for the form factor myself, but I could see a Mac about the size of a checkbook with a high-DPI display like the iPhone being a popular item. A 1920 x 1080 OLED display around 6x3 inches could be pretty cool. Two gigs of DRAM and 20 gigs of flash RAM, and you'd have a rather capable machine.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
> A 1920 x 1080 OLED display around 6x3 inches could be pretty cool.
I'd be happy with half that resolution on a screen that size. I doubt your eye could perceive the extra detail at a sensible viewing distance anyway. The iPhone screen res is just not quite enough to look sharp (it's "480-by-320-pixel resolution at 163 ppi")
...I want an iPad. Something the size of an e-book, with wi-fi, and an OS that is simple to use on it. Oh and i want it for less than $500...
And a pony.
I doubt your eye could perceive the extra detail at a sensible viewing distance anyway.
He wants about 300dpi which is starting to get into printer resolution range. That would enable serif fonts (like times) to look better than sans serif fonts (arial, helvetica). You would also find smaller point fonts more readable thanks to the additional pixels. So viewing a webpage might finally make sense on a device that small that is commonly held in your hand like a book or a sheet of paper. If we could get to OLED contrast ratios and that dpi, your display would basically look almost like a printed photograph. With current displays at around 90 to 100dpi, everything looks pixely (windows) or blurred because of the low dpi of the display.
Today 300dpi might be unreasonable for a color display. I think e-ink displays get to about 300 dpi but they can't display color or refresh quickly. My 9" eee pc lcd screen is at about 130 dpi. So I think lcd manufacturers should be able to get that up to 150 dpi or so.
I'd like to see the more expensive electronics manufacturers (sony, apple) demand high dpi displays because everything would really start to look sharp without anti aliasing or sub pixel lcd tricks. For example just imagine going from 100 dpi to 200 dpi. That means in the same pixel on 100 dpi you now have 4 dots instead of 1 to render it. If the font is adjusted for the higher dpi, curved or diagonal lines would look super sharp.
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!
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!