1. They don’t won’t to build cheaper Macs. Despite what analysts whine year after year entering an entirely new market segment that is already heavily competitive and has low profit margins is not a smart move. You’ll just burn up lots of money in development and marketing and never get a profit to show for it. So Apple will not build cheap PCs unless they do something others don’t do well so that they don’t have direct competition. They never would have built iPod or iPhone if there had been credible competition for quality of user experience at launch. (BTW, the reason copycat netbooks work for others is because they already had market presence in cheap laptops and no premium brand to protect -> much less cost to market.) Besides there is the ROI issue, Apple almost certainly gets better return for the money they would use on making a netbook if they spend it on developing the higher margin products they already have. Or new higher margin products. Returns from investing on a netbook would be at best low. People seem to think that low returns is better than no return, but Jobs probably thinks that he can get much better elsewhere. He has that kind of mind.

2. Apple doesn’t want to run Flash or Java (or unmoderated apps of any other type) on small compact mobile devices. Not on iPhone and not on a netbook. Which kind of begs the question: what would a netbook do that an iPhone can’t do and still fit in your pocket and function as a phone? Apple might change its mind if Sun and Adobe came up with mobile profiles for Java and Flash that… worked kind of like AJAX already does… People seem to have trouble realizing this but in mobile devices less is better, anything that doesn’t do something that was impossible before is not really a feature, it is bloat that directly reduces quality.

Just my 2 cents.

The problem with apple computers (realistically the only I can think of) is their need to keep all of their PC’s in the high end spectrum.

We saw from the clone that was quickly shut down that it can be very cheap to make a mac computer, and a netbook would put them out there. I have been looking at netbooks for travel myself.

a 600 dollar mac would draw in a lot of new customers, and may even gateway them to the larger more powerful systems. Many who are afraid of a new OS could learn cheap, and upgrade if they liked to a more full featured computer.

Sadly, mac holds its place by identifying with the “hip” crowd, which makes them price high to follow the price line of trendy items.

We can only hope.