The Macalope

Speaking of professional trolls, ZDNet’s Robin Harris provides a veritable omnibus of stupid. An omnishortbus, if you will.

The title?

Apple’s new MacBooks: flop or fiasco?

What prompts this bon mot? What appears to be an unattributed report saying Apple has cut MacBook orders by 20-30% in DigiTimes, the outfit that said Apple would offer an AMD-powered laptop.

Mmm! That’s good troll! The Macalope has always said that troll is always better when it’s fresh. But remember to eat it before the sun comes up or it turns to stone.

Harris wonders why Apple can’t be more like HP and pump out low-margin laptops that drive market share and revenue. HP’s laptop business is, unarguably, doing well from a revenue perspective, but Harris’ numbers are a little out of date. HP’s laptop revenue increased 26% in the third fiscal quarter (announced in August) as Harris notes, but that fell slightly to 21% for the fourth quarter (announced yesterday).

Meanwhile, Apple’s year-over-year increase in laptop sales revenue for the third calendar quarter (announced last month) was 17%. Not as great as HP’s, but still nothing to cause investors to demand the head of Steve Jobs on a festive platter surrounded by Thanksgiving-themed garnishes.

Harris asks:

When was the last time you picked up your notebook and thought “I wish it weren’t so flimsy!”

Funny you should ask, because it was literally last night.

The Macalope switched from a PowerBook to a MacBook earlier in the year and, while he’s been pleased with the unit and would make the same decision again if he had to, the build quality is disappointing compared to the Pro. The plastic bends and separates at the seams and Mrs. Macalope’s white MacBook has even slivered at one edge.

The new design specifically addressed these concerns. Harris must be used to a different standard.

Steve Jobs is a design geek, which is usually a Good Thing. But he over reaches regularly and the results hurt.

Yeah. Hurts like a fox.

(Huh?)

Harris’ examples of Jobs’ painful overreaching? The swing-arm iMac, the G4 Cube and the NeXT Cube. Even if you buy Harris’ claim that these were all very costly flops (which is a joke), that’s three flops over a 30-year career in technology. By any standard, that’s a tremendous success.

Steve’s history of putting form before function – or price – comes at a particularly bad time.

Stop. The phrase is “form before function”, which is really something Apple hasn’t done since the hockey-puck mouse. At any rate, the new MacBooks are both formtacular and functacular. If you want to say Apple puts form before price, just say that. Because what you wrote is simply not true.

Netbooks are moving prices into iPod Touch territory.

And, with the App Store, the iPod touch is moving functionality into netbook territory (certainly for gaming, anyway).

And with Moore’s Law pushing performance up more people will buy them instead of standard notebooks.

Will they? Or is the netbook as currently defined a niche product without an audience? Does everyone want an underpowered (remember, it’s all relative, Robin) device with a tiny screen? Sure, you might want a netbook if you’re backpacking across Europe, but do you want to give up on performance when you’re just going to the kitchen for a snack?

By investing in a costly feature no one asked for Apple is stalling its rapid growth in notebook marketshare.

You keep saying that no one asked for this but the fact of the matter is customers expect a higher quality product from Apple. While the Macalope doesn’t agree with his Macworld compatriot Cyrus Farivar that it’s a foregone conclusion that Apple won’t release a netbook in 2009, Cyrus is spot on noting that market share is generally not the company’s primary concern (certainly when it comes to Macs at least).

Remember what the entire premise that the MacBook is either a flop or a fiasco is based on. The Macalope knows business is tough these days, but would someone tell ZDNet that having a blowout sale on stupid isn’t really going to improve their bottom line?