The (fake) MacBook Nano

For some, one of the disappointing aspects of last month's raft of Notebook announcements from Apple was the absence of even a sniff of a sub-notebook model in the offing. Well it looks like someone has taken matters into their own hands, turning wishful thinking into a blatant rip-off with a fake "MacBook Nano" fashioned from an MSI U100 netbook running Mac OS X.

Though its exact origins remain a mystery, the fake surfaced in a Flickr photo set earlier this week and has attracted plenty of commentary (here and here for example). The specs provided tell us that that the machine has a 10" WSVGA LED (1024x600), weighs 2.2 lbs, uses a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor with 2GB RAM and a 320GB hard drive running on XP Pro+OSX 10.5.5. Another photo set shows the tinkering process involved in creating the "unofficial nano", which, especially if it's being sold and not just the one-off work of a very enthusiastic fan, must have lawyers in the Apple camp furiously straightening their neck-ties.

Apple apparently have no interest in the Netbook space at this stage. As the category evolves its likely that they'll move to implement some of the "interesting ideas" they have up their sleeve for a downsized mobile computing product... and despite the obvious work that's gone into this fake, we expect we'll be a little more excited when a genuine offering arrives.

Via Macrumors.com.