Apple apps do not have a small processor footprint, and while people have Hackintoshed EeePCs to run Apple’s OS, it is pretty durn slow even with the 1.6mhz processors. Perhaps with SnowLeopard there might be enough speed improvements to consider making a netbook, or the other way around, using something like the iTouch’s OS to make a netbook.
The thing is, for Apple, a $300 computer just doesn’t make much financial sense for them - they already have them, they’re called iPhones and come with an AT&T contract. Why make a netbook when you already have a small format computer? In many ways, the netbooks that are out there are replacing the PDAs we used to lug around.
I mean, a T-Mobile G1 or an iPhone does much of what someone who uses a netbook might want, why reinvent the wheel?
I personally use it for video watching and whatnot, pulling television off of my BeyondTV and MythTV rigs, so the larger screen makes a very big difference in enjoying television. Not the same on an itty bitty low res touch screen phone, and for me, the netbook replaced a five year old Axim x51v.
As things progress, and community supported OSes expand further, it wouldn’t surprise me if they really expand the abilities of these netbooks as time goes on. The speed of the linux OS has gotten faster each time someone comes up with a new release, and as I said earlier, Windows 7 gives a similar to XP baseline. I really think that netbooks are here to stay.
It depends on the apps, plus you need to have decent graphics to run Quartz (the UI). If you don't, OS X will downgrade to using the CPU, and the Atom can't handle that. But I've heard they do quite well on notebook 1.6 GHz Intel processors.
Perhaps with SnowLeopard there might be enough speed improvements to consider making a netbook
Snow Leopard will shrink the memory footprint of the OS and included apps, and tighten the OS a bit, but otherwise the main performance improvements will come from better leveraging of multi-core systems and GPUs. A netbook can't take much advantage of that.
The rest reminds me of the rumors I've been hearing. If Apple does it, they won't be trying to squeeze a full desktop/laptop OS into a netbook (remember when MS first tried to squeeze Windows into portable devices?), but will probably use a variation of the OS X that's running the iPhone/Touch. Basically, think of an iPhone/Touch with an 8-10" screen and an almost full-size virtual keyboard.
Thanks for that info.