Could A 14-inch MacBook Air Be “Son of Pismo?” – The ‘Book Mystique
There was a rash of interesting rumors out of the east Asian computer hardware manufacturing patch last week. Much of the scuttlebutt was about the new iPads, with all presumably to be revealed a few hours after this column goes live, but an item that particularly caught my eye was a report by Digitimes’ Aaron Lee and Joseph Tsai that Apple is considering the launch of a 14-inch MacBook Air especially for the the Asian PC market, according to sources from the upstream OEM supply chain.
Lee and Tsai explain that 14-inch panels are the currently-most-popular laptop display screen size with Asian notebook users, in contrast with the preference of consumers in Western countries for 15-inch models. They note that while globally, 14-inch notebooks represent a roughly 20-25% market share, in Asia, the proportion 14-inchers of spikes up to about 35-40% – underscoring Asian consumers’ fondness for 14-inch laptops.
The thing is, Apple hasn’t made a 14-inch laptop for more than six years, and no professional model with that screen dimension since the PowerBook 2000 FireWire “Pismo” was superseded in January, 2001 by the first iteration of the widescreen Titanium PowerBook — the company’s first ultraslim, metal-skinned notebook computer.
Many longtime Mac laptop fans consider the Pismo to have been the all-round best Apple notebook of all time, with its robust construction and amazing longevity and its extensive connectivity, flexibility and upgradability, with an expansion bay that could accommodate a second battery, a second hard drive, or a variety of optical and other media auxiliary drives. The Pismo also has a PC Cardbus expansion slot, two FireWire ports (albeit connected to a single FireWire bus), two USB 1.0 ports, an Ethernet port, VGA and S-Video ports, an Infrared port, an internal phone modem, audio in and out ports, and internal Airport WiFi card support with an integral antenna built into the display screen bezel, plus its two RAM expansinn slots and CPU mounted on a removable daughtercard.
The flexibility and versatility of that expansive feature set, along with its being extraordinarily easy to open up and work on, made the Pismo both a powerful portable workhorse and exceptionally long-lived in practical functionality terms. The Pismo was in production for less than nine months, but an amazing number of them are still in active service, including two that belong to me, and on which I average at least three hours, usually more, on a typical day. My Pismos are heavily tweaked, having been upgraded with 550 MHz G4 CPUs, their RAM maxed out, larger capacity hard drives than the original 20 GB units, and SuperDrive DVD burner optical drives in place of the original CD ROM units.
Virtually from the moment Apple discontinued the Pismo, afocionados of this superb machine have been Jonesing for Apple to build something similar. Rumors of a “Son of Pismo” 14-inch PowerBook revival being developed cropped up sporadically during the early ’00s, and Apple did build a 14-inch version of the dual-USB iBook, with the same 4:3 aspect ratio and 1024 x 768 resolution as the Pismo had. But the iBook was a poor substitute for a real Pismo, with much lower build quality, and more limited expandability, with its CPU hard-soldered to the logic board and single RAM expansion slot, and even a hard drive replacement involving a major and difficult complete teardown. It also had a spotty reputation for reliability at best, and longevity was not one of the dual USB iBook’s virtues.
When I saw the photos of the Titanium PowerBook that Steve Jobs unveiled in his 2001 Macworld Expo keynote, I observed that it was extremely cool-looking, then almost immediately placed an order for a remaindered 500 MHz Pismo. Unfortunately, the demand for those end-of-life units far outstripped supply, by a ratio of about twelve-to-one accprding to the reseller I’d ordered from, and my order didn’t make the cut. I finally got my first Pismo about 10 months later — a used unit in excellent condition with a selection of expansion bay modules, and which is still one of the two Pismos I still have in production service.
“Son of Pismo” was probably always a wishful-thinking fantasy. Retro is not the way Apple rolls, and under Steve Jobs the orientation was away from extensive connectivity options and upgradability. Apple’s astonishing business success over the past decade makes that philosophy and strategy difficult to gainsay, as frustrating as acknowledgment is for Mac power-users and long term value oriented users like me. It will be interesting to see if Apple modifies its policies in the post-Jobs era. For example, I still would really, REALLY, love to have a USB port and mouse driver on the iPad to use with an external keyboard for decent support of text selection and image editing, along with access to the file directory, so one would be able to, for example, upload images from the computer to Web content composition engines like WordPress. And while we’re at it, HTML 5 may be the future, but there’s a lot of stuff I’d like to watch now that’s only available in Flash format.
However, a 14″ MacBook Air is certainly a realistic prospect, and it’s a display size I’m in accord with that plurality of Asian users in favoring. Fifteen-inch screen machines have never especially enticed me, analogical I guess to my having usually found mid-size automobiles underwhelming. I like ’em either big or small. Consequently, despite their relative ubiquity, 15-inchers are one of the few Apple laptop sizes I’ve never owned, along with the original 640 x 400 PowerBooks and the 11.6-inch. MacBook Air (yet!).
The 13-inch MacBook Air’s 1440 x 900 display resolution seems a bit cramped on that size panel, especially for those of us with aging eyes and wearing bifocals, and that res. on a 14-inch screen sounds like it might be just about the sweet spot. Unfortunately, the Digitimes report impies that a 14-inch Air will only be offered in Asian markets.
Hopefully, that’s not written in stone. Another Mac laptop that was originally intended to be for Asia only, the 1997 PowerBook 2400c, built for Apple by IBM Japan, did eventually make it into the U.S., although it was never officially sold in Canada (some grey market 2400cs did cross the 49th Parallel).
So there is at least some precedent for hope, although another Asian special PowerBook, the 550c, which had a full 68040 CPU and the same 10.4-inch 640×480 display that was used in the PowerBook 5300c and ce instead of the math coprocessor-less 68LC040 chip and 9.5-inch screens used in the PowerBook 520 and 540 models that were sold in North America and Europe, was never officially sold outside Japan, so precedent cuts both ways. Indeed, it’s not uncommon for companies, even North American based ones, to offer products in other markets that don’t enter the domestic marketplace. For a current topical non-computer example, Ford has designed and is building an all-new Ranger midsize pickup truck for world markets, but it won’t be sold in the U.S. and Canada, presumably because it’s not that much smaller than the F-150, and Ford doesn’t want to cannibalize full-size truck sales. Apple might have similar concerns about a 14-inch MacBook Pro eroding sales of the more profitable 15-incher.
Hopefully, it will be the 2400c’s pattern that repeats, in Canada this time too. And here’s a thought. With the next generation of MacBook Pros widely anticipated to adopt a slimmed-down, wedgie form factor similar to the second-generation MacBook Airs, what Apple will do about a professional 13-inch ‘Book in the new scheme of things is a conundrum. The current 13-inch MacBook Pro is one of Apple’s best-selling notebooks, and it’s hard to imagine that they would want to stop servicing the evidently robust market for an entry-level Pro model. However it seems redundant to offer both a 13-inch MacBook Air and a 13-inch MacBook Pro, which would make slotting in a 14-incher as the low-end MacBook Pro replacement a logical solution.
I would certainly be interested. How about you?
