Apple’s sour netbook rant

Apple COO Tim Cook slammed netbooks this week, saying the small-form notebooks had “junky” hardware, bad software, and most of all were unable to deliver the “consumer experience” that is Apple’s forte. I guess that means that all of you who were holding your breath for an Apple netbook can now start breathing again. Cook offered his netbook analysis during the quarterly earnings call (all really good news for the Cupterino company). “It’s not a space … we’re interested in,” Cook said. “It’s a stretch to call them a personal computer.” But to plenty of people, including some corporate users, that’s exactly what they are: compact, task-oriented and task-focused, lightweight, wireless, and very convenient to carry around. (Check out our slideshow “The Rise of the Netbook”) Cook has some advice for those deluded souls who want to spend money on these impoverished portables: buy an Apple iPhone or iPod Touch instead. You could almost make a case that Apple already has a netbook — the MacBook Air: it weighs just 3 pounds, its just under 13″ x 9″ with a 13.3″ screen, which admittedly is a bit bigger than most of today’s netbooks. Apple throws in bigger disk drives, more powerful CPUs and the separate NVIDIA graphics chipset. Not to mention that certain…l’essence du Pomme. Of course, the one Really Big Difference is the pricetag. Apple sells two Air models, for $1,800 and $2,500, compared to $300-500 for most netbooks. Comments in our main story (linked to above) indicate folks are not impressed with Cook’s critique. “Had Apple thought of it first, it would have been the greatest thing since the Apple IIe,” writes one. “Apple is just smug,” another notes. Jim Janossy, owner of an Acer Aspire netbook had this to say: “My Acer Aspire One is much handier for me and I use it for word processing with Word/2007, video editing with Windows Movie Maker, web access, remote access to a desktop, and with MagicJack making VoIP calls from WiFi links in every city I visit, perfect fidelity and no skips or drop outs. This little machine does everything for me I otherwise use a desktop for at work.” So…sour Apples? Is Cook missing the point? Is Apple missing the boat?