The Mystery of the Missing Pismo
by Enid Blyton (aka Remy Davison)


There's a giant, gaping hole in Apple's laptop line up. Not a professional portable. Not a consumer portable. A Prosumer Portable, that's what.

Why? Because there's a cavenous $800 divide between the top-of-the-line $1799 iBook DVD/CDRW and the base PowerBook G4 at $2,600.

Not a particularly original observation; others have already noted it, thus giving rise to the 'Son of Pismo' rumors which have done the rounds ever since an overly-talkative Quanta Corp official opened his yap and waxed lyrically about a 'new' Apple laptop. He now collects whatever passes for social security in Taipei.

It may surprise you to know, valued reader, that some of this column space will be devoted to PC laptops. Why? Because there's an awful lot of them priced between $1,799 and $2,600. And because there're an awful lot of people with that much to spend. Even Dell have managed to work that one out. With a little coaching.

Welcome to that indefinable market space, that no-(wo)man's land of the mid-range portable market. Currently monopolised, of course, by a plethora of relatively high-powered, high-spec PC laptops. Now that the last of the heavily-discounted Pismos have dropped off the map, there's nothing, simply nothing, in the middle.

The $2,000 Question

Now in the land of Oz, whose landmass I inhabit currently, the gap between the Combo drive iBook and the Titanium 400 is roughly 1,500 Pacific Pesos for whatever passes for currency here ($US750). For occupants of the Great White North, there's a similar gap, although the $Cdn is worth slightly more than a Downunder Deutschmark.

Consider Apple's earlier PowerBook marketing strategies: there were always mid-range models. The original PowerBook series were the 100 (good), 140 (better) and 170 (best). The Duo later complicated this, but it was chasing a new market. More recently, with the release of the original PowerBook G3 (Kanga) in 1997, the PowerBook 3400 became a mid-range model and the aging 1400 was the low-end 'Book. To top it off, there was the sub-notebook 2400. So all bases were covered, right?

Full throttle to 2001: now the iBook arguably covers two key market segments (consumer and sub-notebook), while the TiBook caters entirely to professionals. No prizes for guessing who's been left out here.

The SOHO user, that's who. Probably the ones Jobs thought would buy the Cube (plus a few CEOs of Fortune 500 companies). Not that the Cube's unattractive; it's just not a PowerBook (now, effectively, it's a Newton). The old iBook was persona non grata in anything but a school bag or a highly-colored, pastel-painted office with pictures by that Cube guy on the walls. Picasso, I think his name was.

The iceBook might be all right for corporate meetings, but executive types tend to prefer charcoal or grey to match both their pinstripes and their personalities. And, dammit, the Titanium would've been black if Steve had remembered his grade-school chemistry and known you couldn't anodise titanium in black.

What would an iBook SE look like? Well, it would have to have a 13.3", 1024x768 screen. This is indisputably the display of the mid-range market. The current iBook's design prohibits a 14.1" display. But you're essentially getting a Wallstreet screen, so that's okay.

CPU? Have to be 500MHz G3 until the TiBook gets a speedbump. Unless it was the iMac's 600MHz unit with the 256K on-chip cache. A full 1MB on a 600MHz G3 would send it racing past a TiBook in most Classic apps. Not good. For marketing reasons, Apple has to make the G3 a Celeron effectively, even though we know full well it could blaze through productivity apps at 600 or 700MHz, given a decent amount of cache and a fast bus.

Ah, the bus. I was wondering when you were going to ask about that. 66 or 100MHz? Since it's based on the current iBook, 66MHz would be more economical - plus distanced sufficiently from the faster G4/400.

What else? With the SE, you should be able to order any of the 4 optical drives you want. For instance, if you want a CDRW iBook, you have to buy the $1,599 or the $1,799 combo drive model. BTO iBook SE buyers should be able to specify whatever they want; that's surely the point of BTO, isn't it? If they have a CDRW, let them order just the DVD. Easy. No point in paying twice for stuff you already have.

You Say You Want a Revolution?

How's this? Allow buyers to specify a DVD-R/CDRW SuperDrive, just like the Power Mac G4/733. Of course, the TiBook would have to get this option as well. Here's the reasoning: the iMac kicked off desktop videos with iMovie. DVD-R (and DVD-RW and the whole DVD standards mess) needs a good kick in the pants as well. Since Apple's mostly responsible for setting standards on this planet (GUI, 3.5" floppies, CD-ROM, FireWire, USB), they should set the trend in consumer DVD by marketing iDVD aggressively (once it installs on a G3). A TiBook with DVD-R would send the price through the roof - but an iBook DVD-R would be a film student's dream. It'd also sell a lot of copies of DVD Studio Pro and Final Cut, just to add interest. And, unlike the 12.1" iBook, the 13.3" screen would be big enough to tell what it was you were actually editing.

Relevance? Because this is wham, smack, bang in the middle of the mid-range PC notebook sector. $AUD4,000 ($US2,000) buys you a lot of screen real estate and buckets of features. $US150 more than the iBook CDRW/DVD buys you at least a 14.1" display (some with UXGA), 20GB of hard drive, 10/100bT, probably CardBus FireWire and a CDRW. Plus room for a wireless LAN card, space for an internal Zip or extra hard drive, and more indecipherable flashing lights and Any keys than you can possibly work out what to do with. Plus a copy of Win 200 Pro most likely, thrown in for good measure, or Win Me if you're unlucky (in both instances it's WinLose). Not to mention the business/accounting software that sweetens the crockpot considerably.

Ding-Dong Dell

As has become my wont, I took a reindeer over to the Dell Store and peered inside the slow-loading window. No Dell fairies appeared to be about, so I let myself in and looked around. It smelt a bit funny, but that was probably just Michael Dell sitting in the corner trying to figure out an abacus.

But there're more shop windows. There's IBM and Compaq and three brands you've probably never heard of, and probably never will again when it's time to honor the warranty. I won't provide a long, boring commentary on the spec sheet, as I think it's pretty self-explanatory. Suffice to say that some PC makers do a very good job of hiding things from their tech spec sheets. For good measure, I've thrown in the specs of the last known sighting of the Pismo to give you a bit of comparative data.

CPU Hard drive RAM (Std/max) Display Ethernet Media bay Video card Warranty Weight Battery Price
Compaq Armada E500 PIII-700MHz 10GB 64/512MB 15" SXGA 10/100 CardBus Removable DVD ATI Pro, 8MB 1 year 5.7lbs 3.5 hour LiION $1,949
Dell Inspiron 8000 PIII-900MHz 20GB 128MB,SDRAM,2DIMMs/512MB 15" SXGA Optional (Free) Removable DVD or CDRW 16MB DDR 4X AGP NVIDIA GeForce2 Go 3 years 7.2lbs 2.5 hour LiION (with optional 59wh battery) $2,078
IBM ThinkPad T Series PIII-800MHz 10GB 128/512MB 13.3" XGA Optional Removable 24x CD-ROM ATI Rage Mobility, 8MB 3 years 4.8/5.2lbs Not specified $2,199
Ashton Digital PIII-1GHz 20GB 128MB/256MB? 14.1" XGA

?

DVD Not specified 3 years 5.9lbs 2.5-3 hours (with Maximate LiION - $159) $2,099
ProStar 2253 PIII-1GHz 20GB 64/512MB 14.1" XGA 10/100 CardBus* DVD Shared video memory, VRAM not specified 1 year 6.5lbs LiION, no life specified $1,440#
Micro Express NP1000A PIII-800MHz 20GB 256/256MB 15.1" UXGA 10/100 CardBus* DVD ATI Rage Mobility, 16MB 4 years Not specified Not specified $1,999
Apple PowerBook G3/500 (Pismo) PowerPC 750, 500MHz, 1MB L2 cache 20GB 128MB/1GB 14.1" XGA 10/100 built-in** Removable DVD ATI Rage Pro, 8MB 1 year 5.9lbs 5 hour LiION Probably $1,900

* Includes CardBus FireWire.
** Includes two built-in FireWire ports.
# Not a misprint.


Well it's getting frightening, isn't it? Sure, none of these babies apart from the Pismo run Mac OS 9.0 or X, but they're seriously competitive with both the high-end iBooks and the TiBook 400. And it all comes back to price: if we want Wintelians to cross over to Mac, they're not going to look at the iBook. Instead, they'll say, "Ay," (if they're Canadian tourists, obviously). "Ay. I can get a 15" UXGA screen, 20 gigs of hard drive and 3-year warranty for a coupla hundred bucks more than an iBook combo model. Why would I wanna squint at a 12" screen for? Huh?" (or something like that, anyway).

This is why if the rumored prototypes of the Son of Pismo are not only real, but slated for release in the near future, that Apple needs to ponder long and hard as to whether it'll be able to sell the damn thing to (a) Wintel crossovers or (b) the great unwashed (a disappearing species, but a more likely bet to buy a Mac first up). Option (c) doesn't really bear thinking about: cannibalising both iBook and TiBook sales.

This is why, I reckon, Apple needs Son of Pismo to be an iBook SE. Same chassis, no Cubist pretensions to a wholly new design. Hell, look how many variations of the IIvi/vx chassis Apple turned out (7100 [I think], 7500, 7600, 7300). Simply grafting on the bigger screen and BTO-ing the rest would be a cinch - at mimimal cost. That way, you've filled the the $2,000 price point.

Of course, Apple can't cover all the bases; it can't cover all market segments. But choice is important. Not the 'Performa 475/476/478' type choice that Michael Spindler (does anyone remember him?) was stupidly talked into. But a range of models which might actually grow the Mac's market share. Now Jobs & Co. have just had their fingers very badly burned with the Cube; it'd take guts to put out another entirely new model or product category. But guts and risk-taking is what Apple is renowned for (GUI, CD-ROM, USB, floppy-less Macs, OS X). Every company is allowed the odd product flop (Lisa, 20th-anniversary Macintosh, Cube) so long as it pushes the envelope of contemporary design and technology. Which is why Apple should play safe and simply base the fabled Son of Pismo on the current iBook.

In any event, we'll find out at MacWorld next week. Don't forget: there was another, unknown product in that 6-product matrix. Will Pied Piper Steve tell us what it is?