Slashdot Mirror
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?"
How about the relationship with Microsoft?
What are Microsoft's licensing terms and costs for 10" netbooks, 12" netbooks and >12" notebooks?
The point is that Intel charges more for the SAME ATOM CHIP if you are using it for a device with a 12" screen. That basically forces it to be less profitable.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
For me, my 14" HP is the sweet spot. I got good resolution and great battery life.
A 12" seems to be right in the middle of two distinct classes - the netbook and the laptop.
At 12", its too big to have the convenience of a netbook, but its too small to serve as a fully functional laptop. I'm not sure how well the 12" was selling, but for myself at least I would never buy a 12" because it wouldn't be ideal for anything I want to do.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
I (still) have a 12" PowerBook.
IMHO, it's by far the best compromise I've seen between performance and portability. In fact, there wasn't much of a "compromise" at all -- it has the full array of ports that you'd expect (including FireWire), an optical drive, a decent battery, and surprisingly good speakers. At the time of its release, its CPU, memory, and hard drive were all on par with the top-of-the-line. Even today, it's still adequately fast for most tasks.
It's small enough to take anywhere, but not small enough that you have to squint in order to read what's on the screen. The new 13" MacBooks are actually quite a bit larger (albeit still very nice machines) -- I don't know of any machines today that offer the modern equivalent of performance and portability (even on the PC side of the fence, which I'd happily consider). There's also certainly something to be said for Apple's use of an all-metal chassis for its laptops.
My only complaints about it are the 1.25GB RAM limit, and 1024x768 display, although these are forgivable, given that it's a 5 year old machine.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose