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Netbooks Have a Huge Impact On the PC Industry
Xbm360 writes "A report from researcher Canalys said 13.5 million netbooks were sold globally in the 1st half of 2009. Telecom companies have several bundling deals, with about 50 operators selling netbooks. The success of netbooks also surprised Microsoft & forced them to lower the prices of their XP Home licenses, to regain marketshare over Linux."
I wouldn't have stated it that way, but I agree... people are realizing the race for powerful chips now exceeds the necessity of most people by magnitudes; most people just want to stay in touch and have access to the web. Even the usual word processing and home finance applications, which few average-Joes actually even use anyway, don't require squat for processing.
There was a netbook on display at Sam's Club that had a "is a netbook right for me" app running on it, so I took the test... the first question is if it was going to be your primary computer, and I said "yes," which ended the test with "this isn't powerful enough for your main computer, and the keyboard and display are too small!!!"
When I use a laptop as my "main" computer I don't like the keyboard or display, either... both external. Same thing I'd do with a netbook. I don't see the problem.
Stupid, sexy Flanders.
a slashvertisement for who exactly? i'm not a major university, but i do have netbook running archlinux
I have talked to several people that own or have owned netbooks. Most of the people don't like them. One person in general got a netbook from there husband. He got it since it was the cheapest thing he could buy. She hates it with a passion, but it does sorta what she wants just slowly. If I had to guess this type of story could be repeated over and over again. It was the cheapest thing so it was purchased even though the person that actually has to use it doesn't like it.
So.. netbooks are about 10% of pc sales and carry a margin of next to zero. They are a niche product for those who want a small device for convenience and will see growth stunted as the eekonomy recovers as those who couldn't afford a desk top replacement laptop abandon the cheap netbook segment for low/mid end full sized/powered laptops.
I'm not a major university, but I've worked at one of the largest ones for 10 years now in the IT sector.
On a stroll through the student union / food court on any given day, I see dozens/scores of them.
I finally picked one up myself. I love mine. Its a refurb'ed winXP/hhd model which cost less than the wireless co's charge for one with a contract - now dual-booting w/ Ubuntu 9.04 quite happily.
I like the idea of the portability of netbooks, sacrificing power for size and battery life, but would still like to see a good one that can (at least optionally) go without a keyboard. Gimme a nice size (sheet-of-paper is fine), outdoor readable, finger-touchable display with some USB and/or bluetooth keyboard support with that all-day battery, and close to (if not passing) gigahertz performance. If done right, I can add my own storage (USB, flash, whatever) as well as attach to network storage (NFS, SSHFS, FTP...). Sure, there are tablet PCs out there, but they all cost $2K or have tiny displays.
End the FUD
I'm currently using a netbook as my primary computer, following hardware failure. I plugged in a real keyboard, mouse and speakers, which solves the biggest usability problem, and I'm running Ubuntu using the Maximus window manager to get the best use of the small screen. I've also customized Firefox to avoid wasted space. The biggest hardware limitation is the ram size. It's hard to go back from 4GB to 512MB. Hopefully I'll soon be back on a better computer, but the netbook is tolerable.
One of the main selling points for Netbooks was that they were tiny, and could fit in your purse, shoulder bag, or carry-on bag and be taken with you on trips and vacations to check emails, update your facespace, dump camera images to upload, and basically simple tasks that you might want to do when away from home and your main PC and not have to carry a real bulky laptop around with you. Unfortunately, the new "netbooks" are as big as laptops these days, which defeats the entire idea behind them. Instead of making them SMALLER, they are going the opposite direction. By now we should have netbooks with 3" screens that go in your pocket that complete with smartphones and devices like the ipod touch. A budget OQO, basically. To me, netbooks should not be considered a netbook if the screen is larger than 8". Anything bigger and you're in portable laptop territory, regardless of processor speed.
Strange use of an ampersand, indeed.
My learning for today: until the 1900's "&" was the 27th letter of the alphabet!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand#History
I've been looking for a fairly cheap ~$200-300 netbook that runs WinXP and is capable of playing videos. I spend about 3 hours commuting roundtrip on the train each day (NYC Metropolitan area) and would love to have a cheap machine that I could edit documents on and watch vids (DVD or otherwise) on. Either a USB or Ethernet port is a must for media/data transfer. Wifi access not necessary.
Does the /. community have any recommendations? Woot often has some really good ones for about $150, but they run Linux, and I know, it's a hearesy here, but I'm looking for a WinXP one.
Thanks.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
Seconded - I don't know if the model you bought was the Dell Inspiron Mini 9, but I bought this in March/09 and the went EOL shortly after. A contact in the industry (very large national reseller) says there is a concerted effort coming from OEMs and Intel to bump up screen size, features, but most importantly *PRICE* on netbooks and this very much appears to be taking place looking at today's offerings compared to what was available at the start of the year.
Seems the early Atom netbooks (as opposed to the earlier Asus eeePC with a Celeron CPU) did a little *TOO* good a job of providing everything you need for $300 or less.
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
So don't go to 512MB. I replaced the 512MB in my EeePC 900 with a stock 2GB SODIMM. I also upped the 4GB SSD to 32GB.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Maybe the real reason is that Linux versions are no longer in stock because of MS pressure?
How am I supposed to buy something that is not even offered to me?
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
>>>People are keeping older computers longer now
That's true. (caresses his Commodore Amiga 4000 lovingly) (just kidding). But if I was buying new I'd still want the most-or-second-most powerful CPU if only for longevity. I keep my cars 20+ years until they die, and it would be cool if I could do the same with a PC too. The Pentium 4 3000 MHz I have now is seven years and I still don't feel a need to upgrade. My AMD 500 megahertz laptop is 11 years but that's pushing it (the porn plays back in slow-motion)./
>>>for BASIC usage my newest machine a 2.5Ghz Phenom
You still program in BASIC? Cool. I wrote a Star Trek battle game in BASIC. It's simple but fun. ;-)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I agree that the keyboard & display are too small, both on netbook or laptop. But even a wimpy netbook is powerful enough for most tasks, except of course running Vista.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Don't think so. I'm currently using an ASUS EEE 1000HE (N280 I believe). I have no issues with flash videos stuttering for SD content (pretty sure Hulu uses flash throughout). Bear in mind I have wiped off XP Home, upgraded to 2GB of RAM and installed XP Pro, additionally disabling the services I don't use on a daily basis. Prior to the re-install and disabling of services the stutter was there and quite pronounced. Google Earth gave me problems (rendered horribly slow) prior to the re-install as well, now works great. For those who don't know which services to turn off... Deal with the stuttering. If you are still brave enough to try, this is a good beginners guide to disabling some of the services in question (stick to the "SAFE" configuration): http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm Honest opinion; I have a Quad-core "dream machine" I built that is useless save for gaming and re-encoding video now. I typically only use the netbook and my HTPC.
Is it? The car I drive today is basically the same as the car I drove when I was 18. About 100 horsepower, holds 5 people, has a trunk for groceries, and gets around 35 MPG. The industry has not stagnated because they learned to sell style, and encourage people to upgrade simply because the top changed.
The PC industry needs to learn to do the same. Or else end-up just like the kitchen industry (selling appliances barely above cost).
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I think most people are disappointed when they see how slow they are.
Well, I have an Eee PC with a 1GHz processor. It seems to run apps about as fast as other 1GHz systems I've seen. I've got Eclipse, a CAD system plus some other 'heavy duty' applications on it and it seems to do just fine.
What OS are you running on your 'slow' netbook?
Have gnu, will travel.
Have you actually seen what it takes to upgrade the memory in some netbooks?
Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_jUFbxHoAU
Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvoixR46wNY
The Atom netbooks all support 2GB RAM unless the manufacturer crippled them.
My Samsung NC10 has 2GB RAM (after $20 upgrade). This model also has a full-sized keyboard and an 8 hour battery.
I'm a gamer, so I need a bitchin desktop. But when I'm traveling? The NC10 is more than enough.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
First of all, this isn't 1986. For CHRIST'S SAKE, and on behalf of all Slashdotters, please type an entire paragraph before hitting "enter."
No. Microsoft can't tolerate competitors. So they stopped
trying to IGNORE the product that people wanted. This
product was cheap small laptops. XP really had nothing to
do with it. Once netbooks took off, it was just another
market segment that Microsoft could muscle into.
Microsoft wasn't *trying* to ignore netbooks, that's a ridiculous statement. Microsoft was caught-by-surprise by that market, and therefore had no products that catered to it. Quite the contrary: Microsoft was developing with the exact opposite assumption, which is why Vista has such high hardware requirements, in comparison to their other OSes.
What made netbooks viable was two things:
1) Linux OSes, which could easily be adapted to run well on the limited hardware. Or, depending on the distro, already ran well on it because of comparative feature-bareness.
2) Windows XP, which ran well on the limited hardware simply because it was so freakin' old. (Netbook hardware is pretty much exactly what XP designers had in-mind when they originally released it.)
Option 1 was free, and originally option 2 was expensive, which is why early netbooks mostly ran Linux. When Microsoft saw that his market segment was going to be popular and, more importantly, that they wouldn't have any products to address it for at least 2 more years (remember: they were taken by surprise), they lowered the cost of the XP license to be more competitive with Linux. And it worked: now most netbooks are sold with Windows XP.
Now that Microsoft is aware of this market, and is developing Windows 7 to work well on netbook hardware, it'll be much more difficult for Linux or Chrome OS (or whoever else) to get a foothold in the market, just like the normal notebook or desktop markets. Microsoft has the software support, so Microsoft gets put on the hardware.
Incidentally, Google would have a much, much greater chance of success with Chrome OS if it were shipping now, before Windows 7 comes out. They could be competing with Microsoft circa 2001. Now they have to compete with Windows 7, which is going to be much, much tougher.
Linux alters the power dynamic of the OEM+Microsoft relationship a bit.
A tiny bit. It basically served as a temporary placeholder until Windows was feasible for netbooks.
Comment of the year
They are *plenty* powerful for the majority of computer use.
I wish people would comprehend the implications of this. It's also the same problem with "Linux is suitable for the majority of what people do at home".
Yes, majority. A car that can only run 60 miles on a tank of gas covers the majority of what people do with their cars. But a cat that only runs 60 miles on a tank of gas would be unacceptable because, while a majority of people's driving sessions consist of less than 30 mile trips from home, they still need the occasional trip to a friend's or relative's place in the next town or two over, and the even rarer, but still critical, road trip out of state or wherever.
With netbooks, the majority of what people do, a netbook can do acceptably with regards to performance. But sometimes people want to check out an HD YouTube clip (even HQ clips have performance issues on the current Atom N270/GMA950 netbooks), or process those vacation photos/videos, etc.
Take, for example, something that almost everyone uses: iTunes. iTunes will run just fine on a netbook, will play music just fine, and probably play SD videos just fine, but when they decide they'd like to rent an HD movie or TV show, they will find out the performance just isn't there.
Yes, most people, most of the time, will be just fine with a netbook. Unfortunately (well, fortunately, actually), people sometimes do want to do more than a netbook can handle.
I suspect someone's going to chime in that HD doesn't make any sense on an 800x600 screen, which isn't strictly true (1280x720 will look better on that screen than 640x480), is a side issue when the topic is performance (a few posts up someone mentions using an external display, keyboard and mouse with their netbook) and just further illustrates another problem with netbooks. It's definitely *not* a feature that the screen is so small that HD content has more detail than the screen can display.
Point well taken-- I think the main issue is the perception of what the netbook is intended to do. We can spend all day coming up with uses they are ill suited for due to size/form factor/performance etc. I suspect video games and potentially HD video are among the few things netbooks don't do well that people really want. If one of those is your dealbreaker then you are right for not buying yet. I have an Aspire 110L (one of the more ancient models with the GMA 950) running xubuntu. It is quite capable of playing full screen standard definition video (unless it's Flash video... but that's a linux Flash problem). I honestly haven't tried HD video as standard def playback on that screen really hasn't left me wanting. Of course, you have a different opinion in that matter.
There are a ton of complaints about netbooks in comments on this article, it seems the issue folks take with them is they can't always replace a desktop. That's fine, they aren't designed to. HD video and video games are two applications I'd have to give you that they don't do well.
+1 Disagree
First, what cat goes 60 miles per hour?
Apparently, the Cheetah, which currently holds the record as the fastest land animal (the typical Slashdotter jerking off to his netbook notwithstanding.)
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Not Apple. The goals of the new Apple have always been selling the hardware. That won't change, and they can bring out new stuff when they feel the need for it. The software is just the icing on the cake.
For Microsoft, however, it's a real problem. They're selling ONLY cake frosting, and sometimes people decide they want pie or pudding instead. And they can't go into the cake, pie or pudding business because they have all these partners (OEM) already established in those areas and doing so would mean stabbing them in the back.
Whenever they tried taking over industries this way it has happened: gaming consoles, music players, now mobile phones. If they had had a resonating success in those areas at least they would have come out with something, but they haven't. So they just decimated their former partners and destroyed their markets for nothing.
I'm watching them fascinated, to see if they will be so stupid as to cannibalize their last standing market, the PC, and try to stab the OEMs in the back. Because they would SO abandon Windows and move to Linux. The new wave of ARM processors will show the way.
What will stop Microsoft? Apparently, Microsoft itself. I'm amazed to see that it's not so much all the external factors but the mistakes the company does itself that mess things up for it.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
I've used a notebook as my primary computer for years. It still handles the newest games just fine; DMC4, Crysis, etc all play with settings on high at 1680x1050 beautifully. Even in regards to gaming, you can be using comparatively old hardware and still get excellent results if you use GOOD old hardware. It's not like the "old days" where a computer was worthless after 3 years. The reality is that these days the majority of computer users absolutely do not need a high powered system. My wife, for example, runs an old dell notebook, a 1.2ghz dual core amd of some description, with 2gb ram. It'll outperform an Atom, but not by a large margin. She doesn't have the slightest problem with performance. She certainly can't game on it, but it does everything else she needs to do: Largely, web based stuff, non-HD video, etc. Most households have multiple computers these days too - particularly if you count smartphones. There's really only a need for one more powerful system for the odd time you need to actually do something that really requires the horsepower. I'm always on the go. I got my notebook specifically to be mobile with my computing. But really? As a 17" notebook at 8 lbs, it's "portable"... but I never take it anywhere. Packing up it's huge power brick and lugging around the bag, coupled with the awareness that it's still a very expensive machine make it unpleasant to actually travel with. I never, ever game "on the go" I'm looking to pick up a Netbook. The lions share of computer use I do - virtually ALL the computer use I do outside of gaming - is easily handled by one. Further, they are small enough to be stuffed into any random bag, and cheap enough to be moved around freely, without undue concern. If I bang up a $300 notebook, it's not going to hit my like damaging a $2500 notebook. Their batteries (when you get 6 and 9 cell variants at least) power them many times longer than my notebook will run even without doing anything strenuous. Why wouldn't you go Netbook for portable computing?
Meh.