The MacBook is too darned heavy and cumbersome for me to drag around in a small shoulder bag on business trips. The MacBook Air is also too heavy and too big to fit in my shoulder bag. And, it is crippled with just one USB port and small memory capacity for the money. OTOH, the Dell Mini 9 has just the right form factor, and is not terribly weighty at 2.3 lb., and mine now is running MacOS 10.5.7. That’s right: it’s a Hackintosh! [Google that one if you are unfamiliar with it.] Typing is not all that convenient, and with only 16GB SSHD, memory is kind of low. But, it accepts SDHC memory cards, so I added another 16GB of storage for about $32. I have to be careful with updates/upgrades, because some of them ruin the screen (turn it an unreadable gray). So, I have had to re-build it from scratch a few times.

Where am I going with all this? I WISH THAT APPLE WOULD BUILD A REAL MACINTOSH NETBOOK! I would pay a premium price for one, more than the $500 that I paid for the fully-tricked-out Dell Mini 9 when I bought the very first one off the line (and ran Unbutu until the Hackintosh info went out on the ‘net). Cupertino, are you listening?

To me, this suggests that there is some segmentation/re-classification of their various products planned that is probably timed to the tablet device rollout, something that I blogged about in:

Analysis: Apple June Quarter Earnings Call – Keeping it Real
http://bit.ly/vbi9q

Check it out, if interested.

Mark