Is Apple Revamping Its Laptop Line?

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will be among the "several wonderful new products" Jobs referred to in the earnings press release issued July 21. It's a relatively easy leap from a cost perspective to get to 9 in. from the 3.5-in. display that's in the current iPhone and iPod touch, Callgrove says. Anything larger, given the current costs, would be too costly.

Surely Apple will find willing buyers for a multitouch-capable mini-Mac with a full keyboard. The success of the MacBook Air suggests there's a new willingness at Apple's Cupertino (Calif.) headquarters to fundamentally rethink what a Mac notebook can be. Taiwan's Asustek has shown some spark with its diminutive eePC (BusinessWeek.com, 3/6/08).

Imagine the possibilities. Zoom in on pictures or documents easily, using a motion similar to that of the "pinch" that makes the iPhone so great. You could "zoom" in and out of the desktop, letting you arrange tasks as easily as you would pieces of paper on your real desk, and just as easily zoom in and out of applications.

A Breakthrough Bargain?

If you like Spaces, the feature on the Mac that lets you dedicate virtual screens to each application and then switch between them at a keystroke, you might like it better if you could use your fingers to swipe between one space and another in the same way you can now swipe between home screens on the iPhone. That smaller mini-Mac screen might not seem so little after all.

An argument against a touchscreen mini-Mac is that it might cannibalize sales of the MacBook Air. But Apple could minimize such risks by keeping the price lower—say, by offering limited storage capacity, such as 32 gigabytes on a solid-state flash memory drive. That's the same as what's available on the higher-end $499 version of the iPod touch. Using flash would give the machine the ability to travel well; all the data stored on the drive would survive a drop, for instance. Plus it could be as thin as the Air, if not thinner, while still having room for a USB port or two.

Most important, this new, smaller machine could sell for less than $800—new price territory for Apple. (The current starting price for a MacBook is $1,099.) It would certainly be a popular product, with both an excellent set of features and an aggressive price. Multitouch screens could then easily migrate up the ladder into mainstream Apple notebooks, then into the iMac, and perhaps even its line of Cinema Displays desktop monitors. Perhaps in time we'll be so accustomed to using touchscreens that we no longer need a mouse.

Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.