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."

Comments

Re:It's fairly obvious why they are so successful.

[fredjh]

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.

Re:Taken with a grain of salt

[yincrash]

a slashvertisement for who exactly? i'm not a major university, but i do have netbook running archlinux

Re:It's fairly obvious why they are so successful.

[Mprx]

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.

Re:9" linux netbook was perfect

[Rudeboy777]

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.

Re:Kind of obvious

[Tweenk]

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?