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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?"
You're probably on to something here. Without a decent battery life, the whole netbook concept doesn't make a lot of sense. Along those lines, my first laptop purchase was the 13" MacBook Pro since it was small and has a long battery life.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
I am tired of Intel's crap. Dozens and dozens of different processors that vary by speed, features, and price, and completely artificial restrictions on which processor(s) can be put into which products. How does even Intel keep them all straight? All if it is designed to do nothing more than screw the consumer.
What I would like to see is it all simplified down to a couple processor families -- Low End and High End, with one processor in each of those families with maybe 4 or 5 different speed grades with all the features in all of the processors. I cannot believe that Intel wouldn't make more money mass producing a few models with greater economies of scale than this huge number that vary only by who has virturalization here and who has hyper-threading there, plus who actually has both. And eventually the High End is replaced by the New High End, and the old High End becomes the New Low End.
I'm in the market for a netbook to buy over the next few months. I need something to take on the road to be small, inexpensive, handle e-mail, browse the web, and allow me to write with a reasonably full-sized standard keyboard and acceptable battery life. I am so disgusted with Intel's phony restrictions that I'm going to wait and see what the ARM-powered netbooks turn out like before I make my final decision. I don't fear a unix machine.
The ugly (to Intel) truth is that even lower end processors these days are all most people need if they don't buy into the Microsoft garbage that you can't enjoy the Windows 7 experience without a top-end processor from no longer than 6 months ago, 4GB minimum of memory, and a DX11 graphics card that isn't even out on sale yet.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What a stupid question.
Yes, please educate us all! We are the ignorant masses, after all. Tell us again how a netbook that does less than a laptop yet costs more than a laptop failed because of Microsoft. Maybe you could teach a college course and get tenure. Then you could meet with all your intelligent friends and watch each other masturbate.
I didn't really mean to be that harsh, but I was on a roll. ^_^