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?"
I remember when I had a 12" iBook. Back then it was considered a normal laptop. OK, it wasn't wide-screen, but isn't 12" just too big for a netbook?
-- Cheers!
The whole reason for having a netbook is that it's tiny and portable. If you don't need super portability, you might as well get a more powerful machine. Market forces at work.
Putting larger screens and larger keyboards in a netbook...the device ceases to BE a netbook. When you start getting into 12-13 inch screens you're starting to get into a form factor that is...well...a laptop.
The whole point of a netbook is that it's small, compact, light, low-battery...but that's harder and harder to do when your netbook gets to be the size of your laptop. You can call a dog's tail a leg, but that doesn't make it a leg. Just because you call a device that's 5 lbs and has a 12" screen a netbook doesn't make it a netbook.
So where do you draw the line? I have a netbook and a laptop and a desktop. They serve three distinct purposes (though I rarely use my laptop anymore because my netbook, with the 10" screen, does just fine for most of those tasks).
Perhaps the reason more people are moving to netbooks instead of laptops is that most people have realized that an Atom processor is just fine for their tasks. That spending more to have a dual-core processor that spends 99% of its time idle and sucking up battery life was wasteful.
-B-
I think Atom purchasers have to declare the destination of the chip and intel charges more if the destination is a 12" display. The idea being every 12" sold is a desktop CPU sale lost. AMD, NVIDIA, VIA don't have the necessary market share to impose this kind of restriction on the manufacturers using their chips. Dell is probably surrendering now rather than continue with a platform that's had its profit margins hobbled from the start.
How about the relationship with Microsoft?
What are Microsoft's licensing terms and costs for 10" netbooks, 12" netbooks and >12" notebooks?
"if Dell was a monopoly like Apple"
How exactly is Apple a "monopoly"? Because the have 100% market-share in Macs? I guess Nintendo is a monopoly as well, since they have 100% market-share in the Wii-market....
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
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.
Hmmm.... Let's see where your logic leads. Apple has a 100% share of the market for Apple computers. Wow. That's so incisive. Read below to see where your logic takes you.
Dell has a 100% share of the Dell computer market. Ergo, Dell is now a monopoly. AMD has a 100% share of the AMD cpu market. Ergo, AMD is now a monopoly.
Your logic is so flawed, so "strawmanish", that it's not funny. Every company now qualifies as a monopoly because they hold a 100% share of their own sales, and no one else can manufacture and sell their brand.
The case is Microsoft holds 90% of the entire PC market. Apple holds 10%. Hence why Microsoft is a Monopoly, and Apple isn't on the OS side. Apple also competes in the hardware business with Dell, HP and other OEMs. They don't have even near a controlling interest.
As for your other comment, the MacOS market, MacOS isn't a market, it's a product. PCs are the market and Apple doesn't even come close to having a monopoly on it. You'd have to be retarded to think otherwise.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Sorry, I assumed Slashdot was using the same sources at the TechCrunch article I read earlier. You can read it at their site.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Yahoo need to pull their asses out of the Stone Age and join the 21st century and learn to build websites. Two years probation or risk being put in a padded room with the rest of them "mistake HTML for a screen publishing language" reject DTPers with only the W3C compendium on the history and purpose of HTML as a medium-independent markup language for company. Periodical flogging with a 300px x 200px flyswat should be part of daily routine.
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
Sigh. Apple doesn't have a monopoly. It's the wrong word but the right general concept. So while people are arguing semantics, they're totally missing the point.
A Dell PC is trivially replaceable with a PC from a number of other manufacturers. Everything else will be more or less the same.
An Apple PC is not trivially replaceable. Changing to any competitor will require changing go a completely different OS, which behaves in a noticeably different way and requires different software. If you want an Apple computer with a configuration not available from Apple, you don't have a lot of options. You have to pick the closest Apple product. If you want a Windows PC with a configuration not available from Dell, you find a manufacturer that does make a PC with that configuration.
Despite what MS would like you to think, Windows XP is not obsolete.
Only speak when it improves the silence.
"YouTube is no problem at all, even HD clips."
Bullshit. Unless, of course, a slideshow is what you call "no problem at all"... ;)
Maybe you mean the HQ mode - that's NOT HD.
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?
Lots of them, so long as you're willing to replace "crappy" with "low performance". You tell someone to buy a cheap commuter car instead of a Ford GT if they're just going to commute back and forth from work.
You tell people to buy a cheaper cell phone and phone plan instead of the huge awesome everything setup when they only talk on the phone a small amount.
You tell people to get a modest apartment instead of a huge luxury suite when they don't have a lot of stuff and the suite isn't free.
People compromise on quality ALL THE TIME because we don't need to and can't all afford to have all the best stuff all the time.
"... 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.