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Is Intel Killing 12-Inch Displays On Netbooks?
HangingChad writes "Dell has retired their 12-inch Intel Atom-powered netbooks, they said today. The official reason — 'It really boils down to this: for a lot of customers, 10-inch displays are the sweet spot for netbooksLarger notebooks require a little more horsepower to be really useful.' Or is the real reason that 12-inch displays on netbooks cut into Intel's more profitable dual-core market and Dell's profit margins on higher-end machines?"
has much better battery life than the cheapest notebooks
I realize you qualified this by comparing it with "the cheapest notebooks", but do netbooks really get such great battery performance? Every netbook I've encountered has what I'd consider sub-par battery performance except for those with the oversized batteries. For example, all of Apple's MacBook Pros (yes, I realize this is not from the category of "the cheapest notebooks") get 7 or 8 hours (verified as accurate by various third party reviews, so not the standard industry "under imaginary conditions" you see with most notebooks). Most netbooks would be hard-pressed to get half that.
I suspect there's a lot of potential for longer lasting netbooks, but in order to get long battery life, you either need a very low powered chip system (Atom is not, mainly due to the rest of the chipset), or a larger and more expensive battery. The first is too underpowered to be really useful and the second is too expensive to fit into the netbook category (most people will not spend $500+ for a netbook, they'd just buy a larger notebook).
Which brings me to:
with the typical browsing/email most people do, having max processing power isn't the biggest concern although having enough obviously is.
I find this attitude to be extremely condescending. "Oh, this crap system is totally overkill for you". In what other realm of life is it normal to tell people to buy a crappy product because it's "good enough" for their simple needs? Most netbooks can't even play YouTube without stuttering often enough to be annoying. Who are these people that only check email and view a few static web pages that are perfectly viewable in 600 vertical pixels without annoyance? Netbooks are great as a secondary, crap computer for on-the-go, since a crap computer that's with you is better than a ultra-powerful computer that isn't. But just generally "good enough" is not a proper description for any netbook I've ever encountered (and yes, I do realize most people have lesser needs/demands from their computer than I (and most of us here) do, but netbooks go way beyond just being too slow for me (us) in general).
And yes, I did notice that, yet again, you carefully qualified your statement. "although having enough [power] obviously is [important]". But it's kind of like me saying I'm totally fast enough to run to wherever I need to go, for destinations that are sufficiently close.
"... all of Apple's MacBook Pros ... get 7 or 8 hours (verified as accurate by various third party reviews, so not the standard industry "under imaginary conditions" you see with most notebooks). Most netbooks would be hard-pressed to get half that."
Wow, that is massively not true. Under real use the new MBP barely get half that as well. My 17 gets 5.5 hours when doing essentially nothing.
Do you have one of the new unibody MacBook Pros? If not, you're comparing the wrong notebook. If you do have one of the new ones, there's something wrong with your battery, or you're lying about how you're using it.
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3580&p=4