Robert X. Cringely offers more speculation on what Apple is up to in light of its announcements from Macworld.Key Graphs:
Take [MacBook Air's] specially packaged Intel CPU, how did that come about? Steve Jobs didn’t beat the heck out of Intel CEO Paul Otellini to get a little CPU that would go into fewer than half a million boxes. Steve did what he always does. He beat the heck out of Paul Otellini with the promise that this little CPU — for which we can expect Apple will hold some exclusive for the next six months — will end up in millions and millions of Apple products, nearly all of them costing a lot less than a MacBook Air.
And:
What about the Air’s lack of an optical drive? It’s hard to find a place for an optical drive in such a thin computer, but isn’t Steve Jobs the guy who when he returned to Apple railed against notebooks without removable media, like the PowerBook 100 and 2400 and the various PowerBook Duos? Why did Steve change his mind now? Because Steve wants to replace optical drives of any sort with bits provided over the network, preferably from iTunes. That’s also why we didn’t see an Apple Blu-ray announcement this week and — if Jobs has his way — we’ll never see one.
Read more here. Also see my previous post on Apple and Adobe.
