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Who Killed the Netbook?
itwbennett writes "Netbooks died the death of a thousand cuts and there were conspirators aplenty with motive, weapons and opportunity. Was the unpopularity of Linux to blame? What about Microsoft and its efforts to kill XP? Ever smarter smartphones certainly played a role, as did the rise of the App Store, and lighter full-featured notebooks. Or maybe it was just that the American consumer wasn't going to be satisfied with technology designed for third-world use. 'In late 2005, the only computer found for $100 was stolen, was dead, or was ancient enough to require Windows 95. A real and functional computer for $100 was a dream, but also made people wonder what sacrifices might need to be made to offer such a comparatively inexpensive machine,' writes Tom Henderson, in an in-depth look at what contributed to the netbook's demise." Before solving the murder mystery, it's worth considering whether the netbook is actually dead.
Shops near me have five or six netbooks on sale.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
What? 2008?
I saw a dozen at my local computer retailer last week, priced nearly $300 below the nearest tablets. I do legitimate work on it (coding) which I don't see how I'd do with an app interface on a smudgy screen.
Clearly Apple killed the netbook with the majority of the people wanting to use an ease-of-access device jumping over to the iPad team.
Netbook as a smaller/cheaping laptop never really worked. Modern software (even opensource/linux) need plenty of CPU and RAM, so netbooks quickly slow to a crawl when using regular desktop/laptop software. Netbooks only make sense for lightweight apps, like those found on smartphones and tablets.
You would think that Steve Jobs is the second coming from the way they fawn over anything that comes out of Apple right now. The iPad is a neat device but in the eyes of the people making reports about it, it has already replaced all computers in every household. It seems like there isn't a day that goes by that some new Apple story goes up on CNN.com even if the new story is just a rehash of an old story. It's all about proportion even when netbooks were at their biggest it was something just barely talked about and many people would have no idea what you were talking about if you said the word "netbook" while there's hardly a english speaking US citizen who doesn't know what an iPad is.
Tablets became the new thing to have. Demand for netbooks dropped and so did prices. Netbooks that were selling for $300 are selling for $200, so manufacturers are moving to producing tablets, which have higher profit margins. It's not rocket science, just simple economics.
You can run Windows XP (fairly well) on a P2. Windows 7 runs just fine on a P4. I don't know what this retard is talking about $100 desktops or laptops only running Windows 95. You can get a P4 desktop or laptop for $100 or less these days.
There are more models of netbooks now then during the height of the netbook craze. What has died is Linux powered netbooks with cheap SSDs. From retailer reports a lot of people who bought netbooks weren't satisfied with Linux and weren't satisfied with the storage of the cheap SSDs. So now days you have cheap Windows netbooks with conventional spinning disc drives, and very expensive small laptops with expensive SSDs.
To me the whole appeal of the netbook was something small and light that I could chuck in my backpack and not worry about, which doesn't work with a spinning disc HDD (when I worked in computer repair 90% of laptop issues were damaged HDDs. A certain brand of laptops we sold had a MTBF of its drives of probably 3 months in actual real world usage).
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
It was the popularity of Linux that was to blame. By being a wedge of installs of Linux MS couldn't get involved in, it HAD to be quashed.
To fit the restricted Windows OS on, it needed more memory, more disk and a faster CPU.
To pay for that AND the license for windows made it more expensive.
HOWEVER, all the big names in the business ALSO had to sell Windows machines.
Therefore they HAD to see more Windows netbooks.
Therefore the netbooks HAD to become more expensive.
And they therefore became less attractive. Especially when all that extra hardware required more power which turned an 8-12 hour netbook into a tiny 4-6 hour mini-laptop.
Intel did. By making the Atom so damn slow. And for somereason, mine benchmarks at about 60% of its speed when i got it 2 years ago. Fresh install before both benchmarks. Did they build these things to "age" and get us to buy new ones? Thing used to be fast, but now, its nearly useless.
I see them everywhere in Australia and New Zealand.
Every computer store carries a bunch of them... I own one, and absolutely love it, and use it along side my 17" Alienware all the time.
Smartphones are great, and i've had an iPhone 3G since it came out and now an iPhone 4.... but it still can't be used for real work running real apps like a netbook.
The iPhone/iPad and other tablets are just for consuming media, not real work. Ultra portables like my netbook are a godsend when I need to be mobile around a large office or in the datacenter.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
The netbook is not dead, although manufacturers are trying to kill them because the profit margin is thinner than they would like. Personally, I think the netbook market would be significantly bigger, except for the fact that nobody seems to want to make dirt cheap one. I firmly believe that if a manufacturer were willing to make a sub $200 netbook with a 7-9 inch screen, they would develop a solid following. They would need to be perfectly upfront in their marketing that this was not a laptop replacement.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
ok, in 2011 show me a netbook for 100$ that is not used, stolen, older than dirt and beat up, or one of those useless CE devices.
The price is what is killing them, they have not changed stats much if at all and after years on the market they have hit an artificially invoked 279$ price point that never seems to drift much. then the question becomes "well do I spend 300$ on a gimpy screen, gimpy keyboard, gimpy ram, video cpu for what turns out to be a darn near 4 year old computer? or do I just go ahead and get that dual core gateway for 50 bucks more
The shitty and hacked-up Linux 'distros' which appeared on the first netbooks certainly didn't help. Buggy, slow and lacking in functionality when compared to a clean install of something like Ubuntu. It's almost as if they wanted the bloody things to fail...
I recently brought a netbook for my girlfriend who uses it for writing/researching her PHD. It has 2.5kg so its decent to carry, runs Win7 Professional without a hitch.
Who's dieing and where? I would like to see how you type pages upon pages on a tablet whilst traveling...
First generation of buyers bought it because it was tiny, portable and cheap. Once they got it, most realized that screen resolution is not functional enough to continue buying into netbook format...
11.x and 13.x "notebook" to the rescue.
Are there really well defined distinctions between these three terms?
Tablet and smartphones popularity, with all their disadvantages, showed that "something" was missing. And i'd say that was touchscreen and availability of lots of cheap apps. Forcing Windows in them, making that either were more expensive, or slower, or with outdated OS, were a suicidal move. Even the few that had touchscreen (or being windows tablets directly) with a desktop not meant for touchscreen were a waste. I have my hopes on netvertibles with Android 3.x/Meego or even "normal" linux distribution with meegoish user interfaces (heck, even sugar interface should rock in that kind of hardware)
Are you saying that Apple was right once again? That netbooks aren't really feasible market? Damn those magicians...
My Windows is NOT slow, it's special!
It's just pining for the fjords!
But seriously, I haven't seen any decrease in popularity for netbooks. Tablets and Netbooks arn't even in the same market. Tablets are primarily consumption devices that lets you get occasional work done, and netbooks are essentially cheap disposable ultra-compact computers that you can still actively do work on. You can still do word processing and other office work relatively easily on a netbook. Tablets are outstanding when you want to just curl up on the couch and surf the web or read or watch something.
I see plenty of room in the marketplace for both types of devices. I'll be curious to see what happens when the keyboarded tablets appear in quanitity, like the Asus Transformer and Slider.
I don't think netbooks are dead yet but at least the development in the past few years has disappointed me a little bit. I was hoping and looking for ultra-cheap ( $200, possibly even below $100), light and slow devices with non-glare screens. Instead "netbooks" basically evolved into small laptops with glare screens (=unusable for anyone who wants to seriously write with them outside). They are still in the lower price categories but have certainly not become the really inexpensive, disposable devices many people were looking for.
It also annoys me that there doesn't seem to be any affordable ultra-small device apart from the (overpriced) Netwalker. When the first Asus were launched I was hoping to see something below $300 USD that is very small, can run common GNU/linux distributions, has very long battery life (ARM based), and can ring an alarm or power up programmatically. I'd go for the Nanonote if it was just a bit more powerful and could run Emacs with org mode. (Phones mostly suck for that purpose -- they don't have enough keys and it's often hard to put Ubuntu or another decent distro on, say, an Android phone.)
That being said, I'm still very happy with my first-generation EEE PC with a replacement battery that gives me 8-9 hours battery life. I use it almost daily for writing outside and it runs the latest version of Ubuntu just fine. So, perhaps to the dismay of Asus, at least for me the netbook isn't quite dead yet.
The current rage with tablets is probably going to see the same ascendance and then drop of in numbers as the next attempt to fill the need arises. Netbooks for me were too crammed in screen space to be truly useful. Tablets are just to interface locked. By that I mean I need to type and typing for any period of time on a glass face just isn't enjoyable. So I figure they will merge eventually. Most everyone I know has a BT keyboard for their iPad; by most everyone I know I mean those who bring them to work; because while you can do a lot with them creating new content is not one of the things that is easy.
So touch screen netbooks are most likely next. Combine the best features of both. Until you can get accurate voice entry of text I don't see an easy way to overcome the need to enter data of that form and the glass surface is not conducive to that.
What gets me about tablets is that I have yet to find one that is semi useful outdoors. Solve that and then you will have something. Right now they are geek toys which thousands of geeks are doing their best to come up with applications to justify their fascination. Too many adaptations come across as a kludge. That is not to say there are not some unique and truly enjoyable apps, its just saying that tablets are still too much of a compromise as netbooks were.
So next gen - something along the lines of a touch screen enabled MBA. The size is right and the functionality is much higher than a tablet or netbook by themselves.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Value/price was much worse for all other mobile computers. I almost never carried those along, so their mobile value was basically zero. At home they were always inferior to the desktop machine, so I hardly used them at all. The netbook is different: The netbook enabled access to all my software, my data and the internet in a very portable device with long battery life and the flexibility of a "real" computer. Faster would be better, but only without sacrificing the battery life, size and weight advantage. The netbook is the affordable "ultraportable", a class of mobile computers which existed long before netbooks but used to be priced as an executive toy.
My netbook is not dead.
I snagged a couple of nice Samsung netbooks for $250 recently. These are great little boxes, with more than enough oomph for Linux Mint and 6 hours of battery life. They do everything an iPad does for 1/2 the cost.
Maybe we don't need a $100 price-point, but even $175 would be a game-changer. When you add in the cost of a binder cover and a bluetooth keyboard, the cost of an iPad starts looking pretty ridiculous.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
As a commuter, I see plenty of netbooks. I never had the impression that they were going away. Heck, even Apple makes netbooks now. Even seen the "new" MacBook Air? It comes in 11 and 13 inch models.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
I can't remember if it was PC world or someone else, but the retailer doesn't really matter. The retailer had to source 2/3 of their netbooks with Windows, 1/3 at most Linux.
So the demand for Linux was huge. However, when they ran out of Linux installed netbooks, they couldn't get any more until they sold their inventory of Windows netbooks.
Result: "no demand for Linux" which, when you looked into it turned out to be "We ran out of Linux the previous quarter and so we've sold no Linux notebooks this quarter".
For me, the need for a netbook was hugely reduced when they weren't made at least damp-proof and dust-proof. If you stuff one in your backpack and it rains, or there is sand in there because you went to the beach, then your netbook is going to get old real quick.
I've got one. The lack of vertical resolution is crippling for long-term use. Even the 800 pixel
vertical resolution on a lot of laptops is a disadvantage.
To me it looks like they'll still keep their market niche.
I'm currently looking into buying one myself because I want a larger PMP replacement to watch movies during train rides and maybe play the occasional game (DOSBox nostalgia). For that kind of stuff a netbook with a 300+ GB HDD is the perfect choice and I can simply swap battery packs during longer trips.
Certainly better than having to take my laptop on trips where I don't really need such a powerful CPU.
I can get a Netbook with a wimpy Atom processor, 1GB of RAM and a little, cute hard drive at the local Best Buy / Fry's / Wherever for $259. I can get this week's on-sale full size laptop with a dual core 64 bit processor 3GB of RAM, and 300 or 500GB of storage for $329. To make the netbook useful, I'll need to add memory, so after a $49 upgrade, I'm at $308 anyway... so for $21 more I get a useful computer. It doesn't make sense to buy the netbook.
-- Mike
Meandering argument, constant repetition and wild swings in tone and style. My favorite:
"The weapons were surprisingly numerous, too. Each one has a different opportunity. No single one of them murdered them, and while there was conspiracy, there was also the accident of bad timing: the right formula at the wrong time."
Back to journo school methinks.
Is a 1280x800 resolution screen - perhaps 11 inch size.
I agree. I'll get to the MacBook Air in a minute. But first, I have the following: Droid X running Cyanogen, eMachine Netbook running Ubuntu 11.04, and a Dell desktop running Windows 7 (my newest edition).
The problem I see is that tablets are trying to replace the Netbook (not so much the notebook, which is more of a replacement for desktops). The tablet is not appealing to me, because there really is no gap to fill between my Droid X and my Netbook. My netbook, a 1Ghz Atom with a 250GB HDD (not SSD) is just as powerful as a notebook, just a tad slower (but not much unless you want to play games). But it far outdoes any tablet.
A tablets I've looked at as serious contenders, frankly suck. They are around $700, have low storage memory, must be tethered to a cellular plan, and cannot run anything better than what I already have on my very spacious 4.x" phone screen. My netbook, on the other hand, was $199, has more storage than I'll need in a portable situation, works with Wifi, Cisco VPN (which most phones/tablets don't), and is very compact with the same or larger screen size as most tablets (~10")
For me, an overpriced, underfeatured, cellular locked tablet makes no sense. Oooo, it has a touch screen... big freaking deal! Oooo, I have a keyboard with a netbook... now that's a real consideration for having something in the "gap" between my phone and a desktop. My battery is also much better than any tablet, because I don't need something equivalent to an OLED screen. It's backlit, and I can watch netflix just fine on it.
This same lack of gap is the reason your average power user who must choose between a MacBook Air and an iPad will automatically go with the MacBook (if you were to remove cost from the equation).
I'm not saying I'm against tablets, or necessarily for netbooks. They just make more sense to someone like me. Now, if I wanted to replace my smartphone with a simple feature phone, and also ditch my netbook, then a tablet may fill the new gap left. And besides early adopters, I think that's the real market.
The problem is this: more companies make more money from tablets. The market (after the initial waves of early adopters are saturated) is that group that has an older desktop, a feature phone, and no portable computers. That's the "sweet spot". But, tablet prices are so expensive, that only early adopters and those with large disposable incomes are really taking too them. The fact that only the iPad has had any real success is actually a bad sign for Apple. It is the exception that proves the rule. It shows that those who might go with a cheaper tablet just aren't, and are more apt to by a cheap smartphone. Why this is bad for Apple is that these are people speaking with their wallets saying, "It may be neat, but it's not something I can live without (like a phone), and not willing to shell out the extra money for (like a phone)." It puts the iPad in the position of the MacBook Air, which is to say that it will have a low market saturation, unlike the iPhone. And the iPhone was able to catch those users because A) people feel they need a phone, so they already need a contract and have to pay a significant amount for for anything decent, and B) they see real usability. The middle class, which has already slowed spending on televisions, computers, vacations, etc. see the tablet as a luxury item, and the phone as a necessity.
A netbook, too, is a luxury item. But it is easier for a parent to justify a $199 purchase for school, because it's better than a $2000 laptop or a $700 tablet... and parents (though maybe not cutting edge educators) see the tablet as a toy, not a tool. Netbooks also come with no contract, and that's a deal breaker for most people still struggling in this sluggish economy. And that, the economy, is the reason for Netbooks not being in the news, unless you consider ChromeOS... which might be a stroke of genius for Google to sneak in under the tight budget radar, assuming they can par down the contract costs a GREAT deal.
I8-D
I love my netbook, it lets me actually do work instead of just being able to playing angry birds. I can type out a word document without getting my screen all greasy and developing and RSI.
OK, ready for it?
The same people who killed the mainframe.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The article stated, many times, that he was stating the prices at the times the XO and Eee first came out.
At that time, the P4 was a high spec new system, maybe $2500. To get something for a hundred, you'd have to find an old 686 or something, and 95 would have been the os.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
The only advantage netbooks currently have is that they have a keyboard for long text entries (e.g. word processing).
Technology changes. Tablets (like the iPad & Samsung Tab 10.1) have screens that are nicer than most netbooks and no hard drives, have longer battery life, almost 100% up-time, and are easier to use. Since most people only used their netbooks for social media and web browsing why bother with the complication of an actual PC.
Netbooks also made lousy PCs. Screens are too small, Too little memory, too little processor horsepower to play games, etc.
Linux is irrelevant.
The netbook nominally - Intel netbook has gone through a very very slow upgrade process. The upgrade process has actually been tied to an increase in price towards the low end notebook market. The upgraded units feature things like creeping Atom improvements and very little else. Perhaps slightly larger disks or a little more ram or a Broadcom media card. But in general, you can argue that they have stepped little forward since inception. Perhaps improvements in battery life could be applied. But in a wide general sense, very little improvement.
Derived units - Like Ion units are better, but still limited computers. But have they failed? When you hunt and find discounted units, and when the price is right, they still make great minimalist fun computing devices. I've been through multiple units, and have handed them on to people as gifts, and frankly people love them in the instance of the low cost fun units. They are less loveable if you pay £300 and start off with the miss-appreciation that they will provide a fully rounded decent computing platform. In that its beyond their grasp, but also beyond fair expectation.
So, in my humble option, £100 netbooks are fantastic, £150 if you have an expanded ION based unit or similar, and they still make great Linux portables, or second machines, or fun boxes for people who are not heavy users. The failure if there is on, is in the high cost and failure to modernise. If they are really going to be £300 in cost, then they need to be much more rounded, rather than crippled.
My question is, why does anybody think the netbook is dead?
For one thing, less brick-and-mortar floor space in Best Buy and Office Depot devoted to them and more to Apple's iPad. In this market segment, floor space is important because shopping online often means that one ends up stuck with a product that's unusably unergonomic.
I sniffed you on the wireless running Firefox 2
Downloading porn that suited you
I could install Fedora on my netbook too
Oh-a oh
Then the iPod delivered a symphony
They marketed this crappy technology
But Jobs put the kebosh on porn, you see
Oh-a oh
I saw your iPhone
Oh-a oh
What did you tell them?
iOS killed the netbook star
iOS killed the netbook star
The iPad came and broke your heart
Oh-a-a-a oh
And now we surf in an abandoned studio
We watch some porn and it seems so long ago
And you remember the cumshots used to go
Oh-a oh
You love the app store
Oh-a oh
You hate the app store
iOS killed the netbook star
iOS killed the netbook stat
In my hands and in my car,
We can't uninstall we've gone too far
Oh-a-aho oh
Oh-a-aho oh
iOS killed the netbook star
iOS killed the netbook star
In my hands and in my car
We can't uninstall we've gone too far
The iPad came and broke your heart
Put the blame on marketing
You are a netbook star
You are a netbook star
iOS killed the netbook star
iOS killed the netbook star
iOS killed the netbook star
iOS killed the netbook star
iOS killed the netbook star
You are a netbook star
Netbooks only existed in your marketing brainwashed mind.
Was the unpopularity of Linux to blame?
No, it's just the people still want to use installed software. Despite popular belief, there is more to using a computer than the Web.
Well I happen to work for a provincial government in Canada, in the education sector, dealing specifically with the IT infrastructure and Laptop / Netbook project that is currently in it's 6 year and continues to expand. We have thousands of laptops and NETBOOKS in circulation throughout the province, with the end goal of every student having a NETBOOK in their hand.
Dead?
That sounds like an agenda article more than anything, the netbook is hardly dead, it's finding it's niche. I don't expect them to "take off" until the next generation of technology allows faster, smaller, and cooler, hardware.
I see the "pad" fad dying off before netbooks are taken off the shelves.
Netbooks never really were the solution people wanted because there still not usable casually. There still just a small notebook that really needs to be on a stable flat surface. To small for a home computer since a few dollars more will get you a desktop with a nice big screen and not convenient enough on the go. They were just a stopgap till the iPad.
As a one off anecdote my institution is buying 40 of them for a mobile training unit that can move from room to room for training sessions. We were looking at tablets, hybrids and netbooks and ended up choosing what would most simulate the experience the user would have with out the instructor there.
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
Netcraft.
Netbooks killed netbooks...Not in a grand conspiracy sort of way... just that the Apps people *thought* they wanted to run needed far more CPU power than this and Windows 7 lite or whatever its called couldn't hack it. Netbooks were/are just cheap incrementally backstepped PCs. So who wants *less* capability just because its cheap> Tehre's a tiny market for that ... sure. Netbooks have revolutionized IT Networking and Infosec jumpbags. That's a pretty niche world and it's a one trick pony. It's portable. it's light. It's weak.
The big problem is along came iPhone, iPad, and all the Android based systems that show you that what you *thought* you wanted to run on these systems, you don't really need and having a device that puts the power in the right place ( awesome battery performance and leveraged GPU and compelling UI ) makes you gravitate to that.
THink about it.... the $200 netbook is being destroyed by the $699 ipad. That alone speaks volumes... consumers are willing to pay TRIPLE the price of a netbook for something they can actually use.
DAS BUNKER, Redmond, Friday (MSBBC) — Cheap netbooks are too limited and no-one will want them any more, say high-ticket vendors at the mere 103% increase in netbook sales in 2009 over 2008.
The small, portable computers sold in stupendous numbers in 2009, but industry watchers have been convinced by Microsoft and Intel to say that their popularity is waning. “No-one is buying a 10-inch netbook that costs £500 and runs Windows 7,” said Stuart Miles of Pocket Unit. “So everyone will go back to expensive iPhones and full-sized laptops, any day now. This ‘internet’ thing is just a fad too.”
What people are looking for now, he believes, is a machine that can keep up with the demands of contemporary web users. A small netbook running Windows 7 Dumbass Edition, which runs up to three applications at a time and holds your data hostage until you cough up eighty quid to run a fourth, is “thoroughly inadequate” to the task. “Linux, of course, doesn’t exist, wasn’t the impetus for cheap netbooks and didn’t cripple Microsoft’s bottom line for the last three years by providing actual competition for the first time in decades. So it’s not like it can do twice as much in half the space.”
Ian Drew, spokesman for chip designer ARM Holdings, also believes netbooks are in for a shake-up. “Apparently, netbooks that weigh nothing, run twice as fast and have an all-day battery but don’t run Windows are a problem for ARM, not for Microsoft,” he said, lighting a cigar off a fifty-pound note.
Mr Miles believes tablets will take up the mantle from the netbook. “If we carefully define tablets as ‘not netbooks,’ even though they’re made by the same companies with the same technology running the same software, we can claim the netbook is dead even though people are suddenly realising how stupidly huge, unwieldy and heavy even a fourteen-inch laptop is. It’s all about picking your terms rather than, e.g., selling what people actually want instead of what you’d like them to want. Also, if you whack in a 3G modem it’s suddenly a phone instead, and never mind the Mini 9.”
“Clap your hands if you don’t believe in netbooks,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “Marketers! Marketers! Marketers! Marketers!”
Photo: Netbook, circa 1982.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I never believed in the idea.
1. People usually, ladies especially, carry a bag that is almost A4 dimensions, or at least A3. One can thus argue that the factor for portable computers is not width and depth but weight and height(thickness).
2. Straining your eyes to distinguish, perceive and interpret information on a smaller screen is not really fun. People prefer bigger screens, they just don't like all the extra weight and dimensions that come with it. Add to this the fact that we still don't have enough flexibility in modern operating systems to imploy the concept of angular-size for on-screen widgets, operating instead with pixels and points, and the miniature UI widgets designed for larger screens simply border on annoying for users of netbooks. A netbook with Windows 7? Hmm, would you run Windows 7 desktop on your HTC smartphone? As it is often closer to your netbook profile than your desktop or notebook is. Anything less than 12" is not a true computer for many. It's not the screen, it's the weight too. If you had a 12" in your bag that weighed 1 pound and was half an inch thick, it'd be no problem. But carrying around 3 pounds worth of 3 hours of battery life doesn't justify anything else really.
3. It is not hard to come to the conclusion that because of different factors, not the least of which is price and affordability, as the size of a notebook shrinks to that of a typical netbook, its weight, height don't shrink so much and the battery life doesn't increase by as much, but by less and less. In math terms the formula is "weight*height/battery = log(width*height)" (width and height can also correlate to screen and keyboard size.) People quickly realize that they rather spend $200 more for something that has 50% larger screen and 20% more weight, same thickness and same battery life.
4. Netbooks are too slow for the kind of software they made run. When they do run the software written for their power envelope, they run into a different problem - lack of applications. Linux didn't catch on (it has apps) because people were either scared off or because Microsoft screamed their lungs out that Windows, again, rules. They all use Windows 7 which is slow as molasses on a typical Atom netbook.
5. Same as screen, goes for keyboards. You can't shrink your fingers. And so we're back to a minimum human keyboard width - i would say Thinkpad X 12" line has as narrow keyboard as a person could comfortably use. You CAN'T make it smaller without changing the definition of what a touch keyboard is.
To sum up, people don't hate portable computers. They hate their weight, height, that the keyboard keys are too smal and too narrow, that the software is not optimized for their screens or hardware, and that they don't get as much battery as they would like. As for battery, it's a joke really - Atom CPU has around 1/4 to 1/8th of a typical Cores TDP, but because Windows is not optimized for Atom CPUs, and because they are often the LEAST POWER HUNGRY element in the entire hardware platform, the would be battery benefit is not there.
You want to revive the netbook market, shrink height and weight, make them wider for a fuller-size keyboard or drop parts of less-used qwerty layout (the Tab, Caps, L-Shift column along with tilde, F1, Esc and Fn - move them somewhere else).
Actually, a good netbook I saw recently is the Toshiba A100. The problem is it is based on NVidia Ion and to boot Linux on it you have to sit on hacker forums for 3 months straight and prey to NVidia they release another new firmware version which fixes issues you didn't know existed.
Laptop vs. notebook: I don't know. A "subnotebook" is an especially small laptop. A "netbook" is an especially inexpensive subnotebook.
When they kept releasing crappy clone-ware machines with broken linux interfaces.
Sure, I loved the linux that came on my 900A, but it was so broken I was forced to remove it and finally toss the thing when its solid state kept seizing up.
First of all, making a "cheap, versatile, etc.." netbook meant using an operating system that was not controled by Microsoft, but:
Unfortunatelly using Linux does not come free, any HW manufacturer that ships Linux with the hope that people actually use it needs to add a set of codecs for multimedia content.
And there is a big hurdle, microsoft and Apple basically pay nothing (there is a superior cap for all these patents and licence cost that they have reached a long time ago), any other provider has to pay about 10€ per machine. This happened to be the XP price for netbook.
So the DRM and Multimedia mafia killed the netbook as a portable entertainment device, (unless you would be willing to just use it as a slow Windows pc)
Adobe would only release "real" Flash for "normal machines" so using any non intel cpu (including low power amd's) means either pay for the priviledge of using a shitty close to useless Flash"light" for mobile device version, or do without and unfortunatelly only apple is "holly enough" in the world of the idiotic graphic "designers" who think it is "smart" to use a closed platform that controls your market, to get away with it.
Microsoft slashed the price of XP for atom bellow the price of the codecs and then worked out a deal with intel to make sure that the netbook category could not grow "over" the capacities of high end laptops ...
And it presured the HW vendors to go on being a "microsoft only" shop, with cross platform marketing deals (if you sell more than "x" units you get Y of "co-marketing money", so selling linux based netbooks makes your PC more expensive
Big retail "loves" uniform machines, so they can pressuer HW vendors to buy shelf space and marketing actions.
The guy who tells you this machine is better than the other is not telling you the truth
what he is doing is delivering the value to the HW vendor that the retailer has sold
so he'll get 5 to 20€ for the machine he sold you this week, and the retailer gets 50€ and if you come back next week you will get the surprise of seeing the same jerk tell you that the other is better than the one you bought (the other bought this week shelf space)
Having the same guy trained to explain to you the difference between linux and windows and what you could do with this netbook has zero value for the retailer.
Finally intel manipulated the price so that netbooks would be "pushed down" in capacities and would not follow the growth course of the general performance.
So for example they fought dirty with nvidia about the ion to stop people from having access to cheap HD capable netbooks, and keep the netbook category in the 600 to 768 lines category.
And the sucker is you! of course if you use windows or macox you actually deserve it.
Both of my netbooks seem to be alive and kicking. Oh, I get it, "dead" as in, I cannot buy any netbooks!
Yeah, it's "dead".
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I personally don't think that the netbook is dead whatsoever.
For proper use a netbook is leagues better than using a tablet, purely having the keyboard makes working on them much easier for anything other than browsing the web or streaming video. The netbook was for a niche market originally, not as desktop replacement as some end users are trying to use them as and seeing them as 'crap' and moving on to the next fad.
Tablets, although nice and pretty, for the majority of things are just clumsy and illogical compared to the keyboard. The only thing lacking for many is the poor resolution on screens (although you do get some decent resolutions, you'd be as well as buying a laptop for the price) and the price ( Many are priced similarly to laptops, which for many is a better choice)
The netbook is meant to be a cheap, portable station for you to use and for that, it still fits the bill perfectly. Although since the netbook hit mass popularity with the general public the quality has been dwindling and the use of HDD over SSD has become a lot more prevalent which is certainly a worse choice, people see the larger amount of storage and automatically assume it's better although then SSD is a lot more practical in portable system.
For what tablets are trying to be for many (A replacement for netbooks) they just aren't anywhere near yet. They are more or less as powerful, have less storage, and most likely have to be tethered to some sort of plan to be able to access the internet. For the price, they are far from practical and the only real reason I can personally see for buying one at this moment in time is
a) You have disposable income and wish to use it for watching movies/casual web browsing
b) Everyone else has one so they must be good
c) You have some specific work use for them
For the price, netbooks are very good, although resolution + HDD could be sorted.
Tablets are just too expensive to be a sensible replacement for a netobok.
what you called netbooks transformed into mini laptops. whereas they had 8 gb flash or whatever memory once, now they have hard disks. 1-2 generations before the form factor mine has (acer's aspire) had 256 mb ram, 8 gb ssd or something.
my acer aspire has 1 gb ram, 160 gb hard disk. it is the same size. and runs windows xp. it is actually quite capable, to the extent that using notepad++ , winscp, adobe photoshop cs 3 etc, i am able to do web development on it.
netbooks not dead. they are just laptops now. mini versions.
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imho, netbooks died when their price went above $300. The entire point of a netbook is it's a computer that is powerful enough to do email, web browsing, word processing and other simple tasks. It's not designed to do video gaming; it's not designed to splice together your home movie; it's not designed to compose a masterpiece of artwork in Photoshop. It's designed to be functional for basic day-to-day use as cheaply as possible. Computer makers, however, got it in their heads that people want teh big numberz!! They want a more powerful processor and bigger screen and ... oh, wait. That's not a netbook any more. It's an underpowered laptop.
A laptop is one thing and it fills a need. A netbook, when built properly, is another thing and fills a separate need. The key thing that separates them is price (and thus performance). In general, if a netbook is priced over $300, it isn't a netbook - it's now an underpowered laptop.
What killed the netbook? Computer makers suddenly thinking people wanted the netbook to be more than it is and pushing the price above $300.
(As a side note, yet, Microsoft pushing XP onto netbooks, and thus pushing the system requirements up thereby pushing the price up, certainly played a part in it.)
People claiming that tablets (namely the iPad) killed the netbook are failing to realize that the netbook was dead before the iPad came along...
i have 1 gb ram, 160 gb plain hd netbook, and i am able to run notepad++, 3 instant messengers, adobe photoshop cs3, winscp on it at the same time, AND listen to music simultaneously, while using windows xp on it.
ill buy it. im serious.
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I see tons of netbooks in use at universities, some students even use it as their main computing platform. They're cheap and well, small. I use a notebook, netbook and tablet pc for different purposes and they don't 'kill' each other.
Who Killed the Electric Car? is a 2006 documentary film that explores the creation, limited commercialization, and subsequent destruction of the battery electric vehicle in the United States, specifically the General Motors EV1 of the mid 1990s.
In the end it was a combination of everyone. Those who wanted a cheaply made device which had a good profit margin and those who wanted a cheaper than laptop device with a small form factor that didn't sacrifice laptop capabilities. Pretty much a no brainer on why it fizzled out so quickly.
its a good insight. i posted in this discussion.
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with an acer aspire 9 inch 1 gb ram 160 gb hd, im running windows xp, notepad++, adobe cs 3, winscp, foobar2000, pidgin, googletalk all at the same time with multiple firefox tabs AND chrome tabs, doing web development. i have no problems.
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I don't get how MS killing off WinXP hurt netbook sales - Win7 works better on these machines, and is available for similar cost to mfg. Win7 Starter is a non-starter, but so few net books ship with that level of Win7 that I can't see it poisoning the entire netbook market.
I have an Asus EEE701, a Dell Mini 9, and a Dell Vostro V13 - with 7", 9", and 13" screens respectively - I won't be buying anymore, as the V13 suits my needs nicely (13" screen, dual core ULV CPU, 4 gigs RAM, 160 gig SSD for $450 + cost of SSD)... The netbook market isn't dead, it's saturated.
Ken
What do you mean by netbook?
If you mean a small, modestly-priced entry-level, but full-featured, laptop then they don't look very dead to me. Previously, you could have small (Sony Vaios and the like) you could have cheap (some rebadged no-name brick) but not both.
If you mean an ultra-small device that runs for a week of a couple of AAs and provides a great personal organizer plus a good-enough WP and spreadsheet - they died 10 years ago when Psion pulled out of the market (their sin: they didn't run MS word and the sync software kinda sucked).
The orignal Asus EEE, however, was subtly different from the "modern" netbook in that it was much more clearly positioned as a "third system" for web/email/note-taking/casual games, with near-instant startup, that was so cheap that you wouldn't cry too much when the kids dropped it in the fish pond. That concept seems to have gone away - and having carefully constructed a theoretical framework and analysed multiple sources of evidence to produce an in-depth analysis I think this was because, honestly, EEE PC was a bit crap and lots of people bought it for the kids that Xmas because Toys'R'us had sold out of Nintendo Wiis.
Seriously - the battery life sucked, the screen was tiny, the keyboard was uncomfortable and the trackpad was a joke. They'd gone for a custom Linux distro which didn't have much software in the official repository (yes, nerds could add the Debian repos, apt-get and pray but the machine wasn't really for nerds) which would have been excusable if everything they did offer had been carefully customized to be usable on the tiny screen, but they hadn't - they'd used "off-the-shelf" apps like Oo, Firefox, Thunderbird which filled the screen with toolbars or produced dialogue boxes bigger than the screen.
Plus, ASUS had a nice habit of Osbourne-ing themselves - by the time the EEE Mk2 had actually shown up in shops, the Mk3 had been announced. Forget any long-term development (e.g. more apps) of the original EEE format.
I had one, and was initially enthusiastic, but then the "buy cheap, buy twice" lesson started to cut in and it stayed on the shelf. A while later I got an iPod Touch, which proved much better as an instant-on web/email terminal because (a) the battery was better and (b) although the screen and on-screen keyboard were tiny, the browser and email client had been designed with that in mind. If only there was such a thing as a giant iPod touch with a ~9" screen... sure it would be in a different price bracket from the EEE so don't drop it in the pond, but 400 quid for something you actually use is better value than 180 for a shelf ornament.
Sure, the dumping of cheap XP on the market (part of the netbook craze was a kick-back at Vista bloat) and the way the Linux versions somehow ended up being more expensive, differently specced or just plain out-of-stock has a role to play, but the product itself had many flaws.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
The ipad.
Your head a splode
Add a keyboard so you can type and you have a netbook at 8 or 10 times the price of an ipad.
Oh, and I can find a shell prompt the netbook.
This same lack of gap is the reason your average power user who must choose between a MacBook Air and an iPad will automatically go with the MacBook (if you were to remove cost from the equation).
But cost isn't removed from the equation so this argument is meaningless. And who cares if the iPad isn't for "power users"? It's like saying plastic forks have no use for the "power eater" and so shouldn't be used.
I'm not saying I'm against tablets, or necessarily for netbooks. They just make more sense to someone like me. ...
That's the "sweet spot". But, tablet prices are so expensive, that only early adopters and those with large disposable incomes are really taking too them.
Says the guy that just advocated the Air over a much less expensive iPad (which is available sans wireless data plan). So the iPad isn't for "power users" like you, so what, why preach about it? You're trying to justify your opinion in declaring Tablets are not worth using, so no one should use them. You do know the majority of consumers are not power users?
The fact that only the iPad has had any real success is actually a bad sign for Apple. It is the exception that proves the rule. It shows that those who might go with a cheaper tablet just aren't, and are more apt to by a cheap smartphone. Why this is bad for Apple is that these are people speaking with their wallets saying, "It may be neat, but it's not something I can live without (like a phone), and not willing to shell out the extra money for (like a phone)." It puts the iPad in the position of the MacBook Air, which is to say that it will have a low market saturation, unlike the iPhone.
Possibly, but it does have a market, and with that market comes lots o' cash, which is the whole point. Personally, I'd like a tablet, a 10" one at least, otherwise it's like looking at a squashed netbook screen or even worse a tiny phone screen. Unless I'm working on my laptop, most of my computer usage is consumption with light input. Large screen tablets fit this niche very well.
To me, the netbook was just an underpowered laptop with a tiny screen and an almost useless keyboard. It was only slightly cheaper than a far better laptop.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
It isn't that cheap, but it is in fact a netbook, running Linux, with an SSD. One the other hand the IPS screen is better than that on the iPad, the multitouch touchpad is more convenient than using the touchscreen, the dedicated keys for Android are very nice, the keyboard protects the screen, and with Wyse Pocketcloud it makes a very effective thin client. The Asus production rate is currently 300000 a month. So yes, not dead, but evolving rapidly. In fact, you could say that 2011 is starting to look like the year of Linux on the desktop - it's just that "desktop" is being redefined.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Please stop reporting on stories from that worthless site.....
You might as well be reporting on stories from The Onion and passing them off as real.
I would like to find a $100 US netbook! john
Niche trade mags aren't any better than large IT mags/websites. Even the "popular" IT trade press has long-form articles here and there. It's just because, since it isn't your field, your B.S. detector doesn't work nearly as well.
I have to agree with this and others. Who says they are dead? I'll admit- for most of what I do- I use my Android tablet now instead of the netbook, but for things I still can't do on the tablet (printing and ssl vpn, for example)- I still keep the netbook handy, especially while I am traveling. I believe the writing is on the wall for desktops and many full-size laptops in the next few years, but I don't see a "death" of the netbook anytime soon. From RTFA- it appears the author means dirt-cheap netbooks, so perhaps the title should be changed...
The iPad doesn't require a contract...
The iPad...next question?
Nope, Netcraft hasn't confirmed it yet.
Walk into any Costco and you will find a few "laptops" for under $400. These in my mind are either netbooks, or something between a netbook and a cheap notebook. They haven't been killed off, they evolved.
... a lot of tablets being used while propped up on stands with wireless keyboards sitting in front of them. So the netbook form factor appears to be alive and well.
I'm perfectly happy with my Asus running Linux. The day that the app stores offer stuff like MySQL, Eclipse, Sage, Spice and a bunch of similar stuff, I might consider one. But if this thing dies and I can't get as open a platform, I'll just pick up a low end laptop. When I bought this thing, the price difference between it and a laptop was pretty small.
Have gnu, will travel.
Netbooks were originally all solid-state for weight, power consumption & ruggedness.
Then Microsoft wanted to get into the game, but couldn't pare down XP to fit into a 16GB SSD. So we started getting all these bastardized "netbooks" with spinning disks in them. And x86 arch... Once again, Microsoft ruins a perfectly good idea.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
A tablets I've looked at as serious contenders, frankly suck. They are around $700, have low storage memory, must be tethered to a cellular plan, and cannot run anything better than what I already have on my very spacious 4.x" phone screen. My netbook, on the other hand, was $199, has more storage than I'll need in a portable situation, works with Wifi, Cisco VPN (which most phones/tablets don't), and is very compact with the same or larger screen size as most tablets (~10")
For me, an overpriced, underfeatured, cellular locked tablet makes no sense. Oooo, it has a touch screen... big freaking deal! Oooo, I have a keyboard with a netbook... now that's a real consideration for having something in the "gap" between my phone and a desktop. My battery is also much better than any tablet, because I don't need something equivalent to an OLED screen. It's backlit, and I can watch netflix just fine on it.
You should check out Apple iPad then. I paid $320 for an original iPad with a buit-in 3G GSM modem, (there is a 2nd gen out now, it starts at $500 though, $629 for the model with the 3G.) It is slightly more then the $200 you paid for your netbook, but it's faster, instant on/off, works with WiFI and Cisco VPN, which you need, has a 10 inch screen, (technically 9.7 but still larger then MOST netbooks.) If you opt for the model with 3G cell it's an unlocked model, but only the company that offer 3G GSM is AT&T anyway. You can get newer 2nd gen models with a verizon modem, but the service is slower then the 3G GSM. You can use any BT keyboard, or use the optional USB dongle and a usb keyboard. I use the an Apple BT keyboard because it's very small, and doesn't have the ridiculous keystroke depths that some of the others have. No OLED screen just standard back-light LCD. It's battery last about 6 hours, but that is 6 hours of awake time. If you put it down for bathroom breaks, lunch break, etc.. you'd be able to use through out the full day without worry. Of course you still have access to your netflix.
I wanted a tablet at one point, but then I sat down and asked myself "what would I use it for?" I couldn't think of anything that it would do that my 1Ghz dual-core phone couldn't do on a slightly smaller form factor that fits in my pocket. I have a netbook, which I initially got for travelling, but it turns out it sucked for travelling. Tiny screen, cramped keyboard, not enough hp to edit presentations/big documents/loads of email/etc. Now it lives in the kitchen as a "TV" which seems to be the perfect application for it.
Last week I got an Air to replace the netbook as a travel computer and that little computer blows my mind. It weights nothing, boots in no time, has no moving parts, a full keyboard, a 13" display, and runs a full-blown OS on a dual core 2.6 GHz CPU. I haven't touched my desktop since I got it because that involves the unnecessary step of getting off the couch.
Assuming you can afford an Air and a nice touch-screen phone, I see no reason to have a tablet or a netbook. I think the popularity of tablets is that too few people were able to resist the marketing hype. I mean I still find myself wanting a tablet even though I know that I would use it for a week and then forget about it. Netbooks, being un-patentable by Apple, have zero marketing hype behind them and thus zero consumer interest.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
I love my netbook. Battery lasts about 7 hours with heavy use, its small and light and 10 inch screen is enough for quite a lot of uses (prefer using vim to eclipse on it though). It's like an ipad except you can create content on it. When it dies, I will buy another one.
...is NOT dead, but may be the target of The Marketeers.
Somebody should have told me it was dead before they sent it to me.
Netbooks seem to be alive and well, based on my experience, that of other posters, and the sales data that has been provided.
I think defining a 100USD price point is absurd - outside of loss leader sales, I don't recall new netbooks ever going for under 150USD, typically between 200-300USD.
I bought a netbook two years ago, and if it died or were stolen I'd replace it immediately - it's critical for my work. At my last job my company outright gave me a laptop, but after a week of lugging that monster to meetings I started using my netbook instead. It gave me the portability to hoof it between various offices, the battery life to handle some Lt. Colonel droning on for five hours, and the keyboard with which I could take notes in real time.
The real question, I think, isn't "Who killed the netbook?" but rather "Why is anyone pretending the netbook is dead?"
Waiting for confirmation please...
It's not a who killed the netbok, it is what killed the netbook.
Reflective screens
Making the "modern" netbooks pretty much useless for their intended purpose, great for use as mirrors though. Mobile phones have also blank screens, but those screens are smaller and the reflectiveness is easier to work around.
Harddisks
Using mechanical memories instead of electronic, makes the "modern" netbooks fragile and nonportable.
Windows :-( ). In most countries you still can't buy a netbook without paying for MS Windows. Although many countries have legislated that you can get a refund for the pre-installed MS Winows on a computer, if you don't have any use for Windows, this legislation rarely work out in practise (speaking from experience, I have three MS Windows licenses, from computers bought after EU ruled about the right to get money back, that I don't want and don't use, and that I demanded money back for from MS, the computer manufacturers and the resellers, but they all say the money should be reclaimed from somebody else and in Sweden, where I live, there is no netbooks for sale without MS Windows installe (nor laptops, and if you're not a corproration, it is really hard to find stationary computers to buy without windows pre-installed) d, neither can I get any help from the consumers rights ombudman or take it to court, since the money involved is to small (class actions is not part of the Swedish justice system)).
Sucks all the power out of the netbook and the battery. Also the reason harddisks are needed and the reason that netbooks today are too expensive (they need more powerful, and expensive, hardware to run MS Windows and you have to pay a Microsoft tax). Also, the windows user interface sucks, eeeven EeePC 700, although the pre-installed software on those models was half finished crap and shouldn't have been released, had a more usable user interface. The UI on iPhone and Android phones are much better, at least for their intended users (which isn't me
For me the low resolution of 1024*600 killed it off. I do have a netbook but I am disappointed in it's daily use. It is just not workable for hotmail/yahoo/gmail and basic browsing on the internet.
Because the suck. People bought them for two reasons, portability and cheapness. You can buy a small thin laptop with 11" screen that is as portable as a smaller but thicker netbook that is actually usable. Cost wise you can buy a real computer for not a whole lot more than a netbook. Dealing with tiny screens (screen size is directly correlated to productivity up to something like 28"), touchpads and keyboards so small normal human hands can't use them... all but the geekiest geek is going to be left severely disappointed. Netbooks are the latest pet rock.
As someone who owns not one but two MacBook Airs (and an iPad), I think the MBA is great for a certain target demographic.
I'm a consultant and an entrepreneur, and I travel a lot. In the past couple of years, I've probably flown around 350,000 miles (at least).
I love the MacBook Air because it's light and easy to carry. Yes, the battery life is a pain, but when it comes to sheer size and weight, it is simply unbeatable.
You cannot do any kind of work on an iPad. It's simply not going to work, even with the keyboard. Trust me, I've tried. The MBA, on the other hand, has the size and makeup of a table with the functionality and capability of a full notebook. That's what makes it worthwhile, IMO.
For most people, the MBA is a toy. But when you're running through airports, every gram counts.
Dell, Gateway, etc keep demanding bigger screens so they would be expensive and increase there profit margins. The was an article and a couple of writes up and interviews about this a year or so ago.
The net books out today are mostly slightly less laptops.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...but it's just that I had installed BSD on it. Go figure.
A tablets I've looked at as serious contenders, frankly suck. They are around $700, have low storage memory, must be tethered to a cellular plan, and cannot run anything better than what I already have on my very spacious 4.x" phone screen. My netbook, on the other hand, was $199, has more storage than I'll need in a portable situation, works with Wifi, Cisco VPN (which most phones/tablets don't), and is very compact with the same or larger screen size as most tablets (~10")
Stop spewing misinformation. Not a single iPad requires a cellular plan, even for the 3G capable device.
If you compare specs, they yes, the netbook should almost always win... but like the Kindle, tablets are not meant for traditional computing. If you want a travel/bedside device or have trouble with standard computers, a tablet (of which the iPad remains the most usable) is much better. If you don't, then get the netbook which, among other things, also can act as a USB host (and sync the tablet :-)
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must be tethered to a cellular plan
That's the deal killer for me, and there's no reason for it. There's no reason whatever they can't simply have wifi.
Free Martian Whores!
It was Colonel Mustard in the Kitchen with the Knife!
this is where the "oh wait you're serious, let me laugh even harder" imagemacro comes to play.
Ubuntu was so nice last release, too :/
NETBOOK NOT DEAD
Same goes for tablets: the reason that we don't have dozens of $100 or $200 options is that even people who "just want to browse the web" suddenly decided that includes fullscreen video with high frame rates. Take that away, and all sorts of hardware options become viable.
Steve Jobs was right to insist on it for the iPad - as soon as the hardware was there, out she comes. But I still kind of hate him for it, because it's created an expectation of high end GPU ability on every bleeding device out there.
Please, PLEASE, stop posting shit on Slashdot.
I can understand a few articles here and there, but every other article these days is some stupid sensationalist blog post from some guy trying to sell me something!
Oh, and stop with the Bitcoin advertising. Seriously, just leave it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I ended up buying the ASUS 701 when it came out, since it had a very attractive price point, and even with all its weaknesses, is a decent computer that can move both regular tools and some of my favorite games.
A tablet is more expensive than that, and...well, I have played with Android in a virtual machine...but I'll keep my netbook forever because I can run authentic apps on it, instead of those half-baked, full-screened nightmarish tools that are now known as "apps".
For me the netbook is the real deal. Small, portable and capable, not a little toy with only a few tools of real usefulness.
Although since I was a child I wanted a tablet, I think I saw something like in a movie or whatever, but it's so disheartening that you can just do so much with one.
Very good point. I know one sales person who demand it. We've offered to buy them a full MacBook Pro's. No, they specifically wanted an Air. And you're right, the tablet is not for work. We have a few people that have bought them and asked for their email. But beyond that, even the serious Mac users here (graphical artists) don't consider a tablet for work (though I have suggested Adobe apps that let them incorporate their phone/tablet into their work environment).
I8-D
A friend of mine had the Prey software installed on his stolen Mac... and the police used the information he provided and arrested the thief, getting him to confess. He's getting his laptop back soon! Check it out.
http://preyproject.com
I figured I'd give you a longer answer, but first... Enhance your calm. (hehe, stuck on Demolition Man lines today). You kinda sound angry, "Rarrr, you angered the great iPad with your spewing, so I shall bold you!"
Anyways...
Not a single phone requires a cellular plan either. I can buy any model on eBay brand new. But does that change the dynamic?
What person would get a 3G device without a plan in the US? Pre-paid data isn't popular for a reason. Wifi-only devices releases late, and none so far have caught my fancy, the Galaxy 10.1 may change that, but I still won't be buying one. If we ditch the contract my "around $700" goes much higher for a decent device (of which, the entry models are not decent).
The real question is why a something separate. Jeff Jarvis has this same complaint on Twit.tv, and I'm in full agreement with him. Rather than get a $5 a month "Add-a-line", they want to hit people up for a full data plan. Now obviously, if I purchase it for someone else, yeah, huge data usage. But if I buy it for myself, why should I even consider paying more? It's not like I can really use both my phone data and my tablet data at the same time? (I actually can think of exceptions, but they are almost all phone-low, tablet-high data, ie - phone for navigation in car, tablet watching Netflix.)
You're commenting like I don't understand what a tablet is for. I do know what it is for very well. But the price is too high, the quality (value, not craftsmanship) is too low (it's a large phone), and it's very immature.
Now, the first $20,000 plasma screen TVs, I would say the same, but even many generations after that, I still say the same. Only recently has the price, quality (value), and maturity come to really be worth the purchase price. And by jumping in late, I'm happy to watch TV on a 52" HD with 3D capability (which I refuse to use, because that IS very immature and I'm not spending $900 for two f#$%ing pairs of glasses and a controller box add-on) for a tiny fraction of the cost of even a modest LCD just 4 years ago.
Give tables (and phones) 5 more years to mature, and then I may change my gap device. The netbook, on the other hand, is just a small laptop, and I don't expect it to really mature further. When tablets can match a netbook on price they'll probably just merge anyways (meaning, a touch screen netbook with no keyboard).
It's an "interesting start". But nobody, not even Apple, has really convinced me. I went to check out the iPad 2. The ads make it sound like Jesus himself crapped his robes when he saw it. I picked it up, played with the interface for a minute, spun through some apps. I put the device back down after roughly 30 seconds, unimpressed. Was not a big improvement over the iPhone 3G I'd had, and actually less impressive than my Droid X. The only advantage was screen size, and nothing more. Not worth my going to Amazon and ordering a new one all decked out for nearly $1000 after shipping and taxes (far above my $700 mark). I'm sorry, but for $1000, it sucks. It sucks big rhino balls, at least, from my point of view in my situation. Mileage may vary.
And, I will admit, Apple has done the best so far. It's not that Apple sucks, it's that we made a phone with a giant screen, and all we really know how to do with it so far is watch video. If that's as good as it gets, sorry, not interested. Then again, the first touch screen phones didn't impress me either, as I had a phone with a trackball already, and touch screen was not "oh, groovy, far out" tech for me. I already worked with touch screens at work. Didn't really care. They had to get a lot better, and I waited at least 3 years. Even then, I didn't upgrade for the screen (which was nice, but not why). I upgraded for the wifi/gps/tethering. I upgraded for a phone that could really act more like a portable computer.
Right now, tablets are just big phones. I'll wait until they act like more than phones with oversized screens, cause that's is all
I8-D
I can't tell if you're some markov bot or what. I take offense to your lumping the iPad in with other Android tablets because it's lack of required data plan was a key innovation that is only now being copied by other tablets. In fact, the monthly optional data plan combined with jailbreak+tethering is my internet service redundancy plan at home (iPad 3G -> router -> rest of devices). I've paid no monthly fee for this and already use the iPad at home for games/books/video. If/when comcast fails, I simply turn on the iPad, activate the monthly plan (2G), turn on tethering (MyWi), and convert my router to a repeater.
Capability did not exist until very recently for Android or other tablets without a monthly plan.
For normal usage, the iPad really shines with the kids and my elderly parents. I don't use it for "computing" in the normal sense, I use it while watching TV, in bed, or traveling, but prefer to do most of my web and hacking on a real laptop... YMMV, I respect that you don't like it. Just don't go around saying the month-to-month data wasn't innovative when it was released last year. Only Apple had the cred to force the carriers into that stance. Google/Android caves to carriers every wish.
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I'm on my third Dell Mini.
Google just launched the Chromebook.
You're an idiot.
Netbooks are far more functional than tablets. The tablet fad will die, for the third time. And netbooks will still be around. There is a niche for them and I don't see them going anywhere.
I added up the cost of repairing my HP "Entertainment" laptop and decided I could just about get a Netbook for what it would cost for parts... Went shopping and discovered that none of the available systems had more than 1GB, they all ran the Win7 "Starter" edition, except for one WinXP model that was in a back room and needed to be ''activated" as a data connection before it could be used... and didn't include WiFi or Bluetooth... After a long day's hunt, I ended up spending an extra hundred dollars over the Netbook that was closest to a usable PC in power... That got me 16" screen, 104 key KBD, 4GB RAM, a dual core 2.2GHz AMD processor, and 320GB of drive space... ($445 out the door with a new {pricey} case) Netbooks ARE a step up from most of the tablets that cost double the price.. at least in terms of screen size, RAM and processor power... but you can get a real desktop replacement laptop PC for only a little more... For the user that needs no more than e-mail and a browser they're a terrific match, for most anyone who can find /. not so much...
Bottom Line: They're going to have to either lower the prices, or double the speed, RAM, and cores to stay minimally competitive as faster, easier to use, tablets, and low cost PC power the laptop form factor run away from them as value for the money...
Hey, over here in England they are replacing both laptops and desktops in terms of popularity so where the hell does anyone get the idea that they are dying from?
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
Looking at the Macbook Air though, price-wise, I could not say the portability of the Air was worth the extra money. When you compare the Air with the low-end MBP, you get a lot more computer with the MBP. Sure a little heavier, a little bigger, but a no-brainer for me. I have been looking at the iPad, and if I received one as a gift (complete with data plan), I would be very happy. But I asked myself what I would use it for, and the only answer aside from yet another device to read my email... Was to run Angry Birds on a larger screen than my iPhone 4. And sure that is an important use :-)
It seems like the submitter's equating netbooks with those OLPC kind of things. Certainly, regular netbooks like the Eee were never anywhere near the $100 price point.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
One does not simply walk into a store...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I kind of liked the idea of the Air, but didn't want to pay the premium, because I don't need it that often, so I picked up a used Dell mini from a friend who wasn't using it and made a HackBook Air out of it. I don't use it that much, but it's nice to have an extra around for guests, it's easy to carry around, and it's pretty tough.
to choke tom, i have adopted the philosophy of "consider the source". it people operate computers. get a real degree and understand what you are doing.
I never touched a netbook that didn't feel like a flimsy piece of junk. Well, if you ignore the smallest Macbook Air, but the iPhone or iPad makes more sense for a sub notebook. Nice portable content usage devices. If I want to create content I need the spaciousness of my 15" laptop.
I might want a small stenographic device like the Air if I did lots of note taking, but i find a Moleskine comes in at well under $100 and fits nicely in a shirt pocket. The Moleskine killed the netbook.
It is the content of the web sites that
we all so commonly visit. The layers
of images, javaScript and add tracking
CSS hammer sites.
Cell phone web surfing suffers the
same problem. With tiered data plans
more and more folk are going to block
adds and other data rich Junk/Pooh.
Screen size is also an issue. Web pages
have no clue how big the screen is
and the interesting bits are often lost
at the bottom or off in the edges of
a screen.
Netbook hardware is just fine....
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Even the OLPC folk missed the train.
Content on the OLPC web site had
and has 4000x8000 high resolution
images not at all a match for the
OLPC and even the high end lap tops.
To add insult to this injury some pages
have a dozen or more monster images
and the memory footprint hammers the
little rabbit eared wonder.
This same oblivious to reality contentent
creation is rampant on the net.
I don't think it is dead. It is considered as cheaper laptop with compact spec.
bits and bytes of life should serve the needy - My bits and bytes
Those first Eee PCs had crappy keyboards, damned-short battery life and you name it. Yeah, but it was great to carry just one-kilo device instead of a huge beast like my 14-inch Dell Latitude to school and everywhere.
Today, the situation is a bit different. Netbooks are underpowered but cheap 12-inch laptops (which means the keyboard is quite usable) with nice battery life... most people have a laptop or a tablet/smartphone (and desktop for more sophisticated tasks), so they wouldn't benefit from buying an extra netbook, the rest use a netbook instead of desktop, tablet etc. I have thought about buying a netbook... but manufacturers have (almost) failed delivering a suitable product. I mean something with 10-hour battery life, anti-glare screen, thinkpad-like keyboard with trackpoint, something better than Intel Atom, some "extra" ports and a convertible touchscreen... for less than $1000. And the result? I have bought a Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 11 and I looking for an used Lenovo ThinkPad X200 Tablet.