[Mugge]

Originally Posted by zsummers Perhaps the clearest way for me to explain is to say that for me and (I think) a lot of potential subnotebook customers, having a very small computer without much battery life is pointless. The point of smallness is portability. And part of being portable is not being tethered to an outlet. I consider it more important to be small with good battery than small with the ability to use an optical drive (who does that on the fly?). You make a good point, though. I do care about smaller and lighter--but only smaller and lighter than the current line-up. I don't technically need a subnotebook. Essentially, though, the 12" was a subnotebook (if not in literal terms)--or would be in the current line up of 13", 15" & 17" machines. But it may well be the case that Apple could take it down to 11" or even 10" & close to an inch thick (I believe the 12" PB was 1.08" thick) without greatly affecting the heat dissipation. My current 15" is an inch thick, for instance, and the processor isn't spreading a great deal of heat laterally--in fact, the optical drive does very little in dissipating heat on this machine. I was shocked when digging around in my old 12" PB how much of the computer was the optical drive. Volume-wise, it was close to 1/5 to 1/4 of the machine. My point is basically that the necessary heat-dissipation could still happen in a somewhat smaller, PB-like machine without an optical drive, while upping battery and adding a few extra features--close enough to a subnotebook for me. But I don't really want a 9", 0.5" thick machine with 3.5 hours of battery life and no optical drive.

My thoughts exactly.