Slashdot Mirror
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
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 $200, so manufacturers are moving to producing tablets, which have higher profit margins. It's not rocket science, just simple economics.
There are more models of netbooks now then during the height of the netbook craze. What has died is Linux powered netbooks with cheap SSDs. From retailer reports a lot of people who bought netbooks weren't satisfied with Linux and weren't satisfied with the storage of the cheap SSDs. So now days you have cheap Windows netbooks with conventional spinning disc drives, and very expensive small laptops with expensive SSDs.
To me the whole appeal of the netbook was something small and light that I could chuck in my backpack and not worry about, which doesn't work with a spinning disc HDD (when I worked in computer repair 90% of laptop issues were damaged HDDs. A certain brand of laptops we sold had a MTBF of its drives of probably 3 months in actual real world usage).
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
I see them everywhere in Australia and New Zealand.
Every computer store carries a bunch of them... I own one, and absolutely love it, and use it along side my 17" Alienware all the time.
Smartphones are great, and i've had an iPhone 3G since it came out and now an iPhone 4.... but it still can't be used for real work running real apps like a netbook.
The iPhone/iPad and other tablets are just for consuming media, not real work. Ultra portables like my netbook are a godsend when I need to be mobile around a large office or in the datacenter.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
ok, in 2011 show me a netbook for 100$ 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...
The same things that made the Atom slow also made it EXTREMELY power-efficient. So the Atom is, if anything, the #1 reason for the success of netbooks - it was impossible to achieve such light weight and long battery life at that price point with any other processor (except possibly ARM - although most ARM-based netbooks are NOT competitive with Atom in the price/performance arena.)
However, Atom does not seem to have evolved/improved much at all. It's biggest Achilles heel was the platform's inability to effectively run streaming Video, although Adobe is more to blame than Intel for that - Flash is an evil CPU hog.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
"But were they truly netbooks, with no moving parts?"
That's your own made-up definition of netbook; while there isn't a universally accepted definition of the term, the generally accepted definitions do not preclude the use of hard disks, and the iconic models of the genre such as the Acer Aspire One have mostly had hard-disk versions since the term came into existence. Here's some typical definitions, as you can see they all basically say "small, low powered laptop", none of them mandate an SSD.
Oh no... it's the future.
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
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.
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
although most ARM-based netbooks are NOT competitive with Atom in the price/performance arena
I have an ARM-based laptop. With an 800MHz Cortex A8, it is fine for general use. Compiling takes a long time, but clock for clock it compiles things at about the same speed as my Core 2 Duo (i.e. the dual-core 2.16GHz machine runs make -j2 in about 1/5th of the time that the 800MHz one runs make on a big project). The main problem is that Freescale has been really rubbish at releasing specs, so there are no accelerated drivers for the GPU or other coprocessors. The hardware has a decent 3D accelerator and can do H.264 encoding / decoding in a dedicated coprocessor, but the current software stack does all of that stuff on the ARM core, which makes it seem much slower than it should be.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
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.
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...
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.
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.