Digitimes’ Aaron Lee and Joseph Tsai say Apple is reportedly considering the launch of a 14-inch MacBook Air, and may start mass production in the near future to fully enter the Asia PC market, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.
Lee and Tsai note that 14-inch panels are the currently-most-popular mainstream display screen size in the Asia notebook market, while consumers in Western countries prefer 15-inch models. They observe that globally, 14-inch notebooks have roughly a 20-25% market share, but in Asia, that spikes up to about 35-40%, strong indication of Asian consumers’ fondness for 14-inch laptops.
The Digitimes reporters’ sources maintain that Apple is currently realigning its focus from North America and Europe to Asia and anticipating the China market becoming its major market going forward, so launching a 14-inch MacBook Air would be be consistent with that, and an indication the company will become even more aggressive selling in the China market.
A 14″ MacBook Air Just for Asia? Why Not? There’s Precedent
Low End Mac’s Dan Knight says if the rumor that Apple may be considering a 14″ MacBook Air just for the Asian market is true, it won’t be the first time Apple has produced a Mac laptop especially for Asian customers. The first was the 1995 PowerBook 550c that was unique to Japan, using a full-fledged 68040 CPU instead of the 68LC040 version, which had no built-in math coprocessor and was used in the PowerBook 520 and 540 models. The 550c also had a larger display than the 520 and 540.
However, Dan notes that heretofore only one Mac was ever designed specifically for the Asian market, that being the 1997 PowerBook 2400c which was intended to replace the PowerBook Duo and features a small footprint similar to the 1991 PowerBook 100 (which until the first MacBook Air shipped in 2008 were the smallest full-fledged Mac notebooks ever made.) Apple contracted manufacture of the 2400c to IBM in Japan, although the 2400c was eventually offered in the U.S. market when the Duo line was discontinued.
Dan also observes that if Apple thinks a 14″ MacBook Air will sell well in the Asian market, he sees no reason why it wouldn’t target that market, and if a 14-incher is successful there perhaos someday we can prevail upon Apple to create a more rugged, more modular MacBook Pro to replace what was lost when the Pismo PowerBook was discontinued in 2001.
