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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
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 $200, so manufacturers are moving to producing tablets, which have higher profit margins. It's not rocket science, just simple economics.
There are more models of netbooks now then during the height of the netbook craze. What has died is Linux powered netbooks with cheap SSDs. From retailer reports a lot of people who bought netbooks weren't satisfied with Linux and weren't satisfied with the storage of the cheap SSDs. So now days you have cheap Windows netbooks with conventional spinning disc drives, and very expensive small laptops with expensive SSDs.
To me the whole appeal of the netbook was something small and light that I could chuck in my backpack and not worry about, which doesn't work with a spinning disc HDD (when I worked in computer repair 90% of laptop issues were damaged HDDs. A certain brand of laptops we sold had a MTBF of its drives of probably 3 months in actual real world usage).
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
I see them everywhere in Australia and New Zealand.
Every computer store carries a bunch of them... I own one, and absolutely love it, and use it along side my 17" Alienware all the time.
Smartphones are great, and i've had an iPhone 3G since it came out and now an iPhone 4.... but it still can't be used for real work running real apps like a netbook.
The iPhone/iPad and other tablets are just for consuming media, not real work. Ultra portables like my netbook are a godsend when I need to be mobile around a large office or in the datacenter.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
ok, in 2011 show me a netbook for 100$ 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...
"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.
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
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...