Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

This post brought to you by my brain refusing to stop chewing on a bit of esoterica that no one outside of Apple pundits gives a flying fuck about.

In the mid 90's, Apple had a near-death experience. The number of people willing to pay a heavy premium for a special nonstandard computer when you could get a much cheaper standard Windows 95 computer that did 95% of what the Mac could do, was plummeting. And yet the company continued to churn out a huge swath of different models of computers, as well as printers, proto PDAs called Newtons, and so on. Losses mounted and Wired published a cover story about the imminent death of the company.

Then in the late 90's Steve Jobs returned to Apple and amputated big chunks of the company, cancelling numerous projects and product lines. He condensed the company's output down to exactly four Mac models, expressed by a famous (in Apple circles at least) graphic:



(ID: four computers in a grid. At the top, labels "consumer" and "professional" and along the side, labels "desktop" and "portable", with a blue CRT imac, a blue powermac, three of the colourful imac laptops, and a dark grey mac laptop)

Now almost immediately this grid acquired some footnotes - the laptops and Imacs started coming in different screen sizes, and once you'd chosen a size you had to choose among low/medium/high end specifications for the processor, etc. But for most of the oughts, Apple made exactly four kinds of macs and it was very easy to tell which one met your needs.

By the end of the oughts, the grid had expanded, without anyone ever actually saying anything about it. The new, unspoken Macintosh product grid looked like this (image thrown together quickly with a meme generator because I was lazy, forgive the small size and low quality)



(ID: six computers in a grid. Columns labeled "consumer | professional | tiny" across the top. Images of an IMac, a Mac Pro, a mac mini in the first row, and a plastic macbook, a macbook pro, and the old rounded corner macbook air in the second row)

It had taken Apple a couple of false starts to get there (the powermac cube, the 12" powerbook), but by the end of the decade they had expanded into a new product category: tiny computers. For a while, the mac mini was the smallest desktop it was possible to buy. For a while, the Macbook Air was the only ultralight laptop with an almost fast enough dual core processor and a full size keyboard.

Ten years later, the grid of six became a grid of five. The entire laptop market had glommed onto thin and light, and the niche, expensive Macbook Air had become Apple's best selling Mac, their new mainstream base model laptop. Apple's Mac Mini hadn't changed in size much, but it was no longer the smallest desktop. The Macbook Air had competitors who were even lighter weight. Finally, Apple's "Consumer" desktops had become powerful enough that lots of professionals were using them, and many consumers were buying the more expensive "pro" laptops. So the categories need a renaming. Instead of consumer and professional, let's call them "mainstream" and "high end", with "small" a better descriptor today than "tiny".



(ID: a grid of six, this time labeled "mainstream, high end, small" across the top. Imac, Mac Pro, and Mac Mini in the top row, and Macbook Air, Macbook Pro, and a question mark in the bottom row)

The complications and footnotes with this grid are all in the laptop category. While the larger and more expensive Macbook pro has always remained solidly in the "high end", the Macbook air has jumped from "small" to "mainstream" in that it's now the default laptop that most people buy. And the smaller size Macbook Pro is suffering a bit of an identity crisis, as it's split into low end and high end models, distinguished by the number of ports they have. The low end "pro" model seems better suited to being the "mainstream" choice and letting the Air go back to being Apple's "small" laptop.

The Verge has a navel-gazing article about netbooks, those tiny, cheap laptops that were incredibly popular for a few years in the late oughts and then vanished utterly by the early teens. And by navel-gazing I mean that the author interviewed a few of his journalist friends, none of whom knew any more about the reason netbooks were popular than he did, and then wrote an article displaying his profound ignorance.

It's very simple, for those who are not narcissistic tech journalists: Netbooks were two things that both had a significant market, at a time when there was no other way to take the internet with you other than carrying around a laptop. 1. They were tiny. At a time when a regular laptop weighed five pounds and a big screen laptop six pounds, netbooks were just one kilogram. A netbook would fit in any old shoulder bag with lots of room for other stuff; a notebook required its own dedicated bag. #2, Netbooks were cheap. At a time when the cheapest full size laptops cost $600, and a decent thinkpad cost $1000, a netbook could be had for less than $300.

Size of course was a huge selling point. At the time, the only viable way to access your email and read the latest doings of your friends on Myspace and Livejournal was with a laptop. A tiny laptop that didn't need its own bag and wouldn't take up the entire surface of your table at Starbucks was vastly preferable, even if it was molasses slow and had a keyboard made for hobbit-sized hands. And of course, tech journalists and other professionals who needed to travel a great deal were always looking for a notebook that was smaller and lighter, so they wouldn't need such a heavy carryon bag. Some of them were even willing to put up with a crappy undersized keyboard to get that lighter carryon. Ultralight laptops had existed for a long time, but they cost a lot more than a standard laptop, and were hard to justify on a journalist's salary.

Cost was also a huge selling point. A $300 laptop made owning any kind of computer possible for the first time for a huge number of low income people all over the world who would otherwise never have been able to afford one. People who might as well be utterly invisible as far as narcissistic tech pundits are concerned.

Then in 2010 Apple came out with Ipads, on the one hand, and with Mark II of the Macbook Air on the other. And within a few years the entire technology industry followed in their footsteps as usual. Full sized but thin and ultralight laptops came down in price to $1000 or less, and siphoned off from the netbook market all of the professionals and writers who were looking for affordable-to-them small and light writing machines. Tablets and smartphones siphoned off all the people looking for devices to provide internet access which you could carry with you. Meanwhile, laptop makers started making full size laptops lighter and lighter, and selling them for less and less money, until the netbooks were left with no one willing to buy them.