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Dell Ditches Netbooks
angry tapir writes "Dell has ceased production of Inspiron Mini netbooks; in effect ending its pursuit of the receding netbook market, at least for consumer sales. When Dell ran through its stock of the netbooks several months ago, it declined to manufacture more units."
First no tablets, then no netbooks from Dell? Sorry I still believe there is a strong market for sub $300 laptops. I realize that Dell wasn't a big presences in either market, but that's Dell's failing, not a measure of the market and demand itself...
First they admit that they don't know how to make a compelling Android device (yet want to blame it on Android).
Now they are dropping netbooks.
Makes you wonder what they will give up on next!
iPad killed the netbook market.
Most people stopped buying them because the manufactures forgot why people were getting them in the first place. They were cheap 'semi capable' computers. Some people bought them because they were small. But many bought them because they were 200-250 each. Then the price went up to 300-400 each. Basically borderline get a cheapo laptop... That has a better screen and better processor...
Close Dell and return the money to the shareholders.
So many companies today with little or no foresight on what the future will bring them or demand of them. This is not isolated to Computer companies like Dell and HP, it is a virus eating at the very core of American industry.
Now I believe the mobile computing future really belongs to tablets. The only difference between a netbook and a tablet is a keyboard. So all a mobile user needs, hardware-wise, to bridge that gap is a keyboard. This can be supplied via an optional "dockable" keyboard. On the software side, there needs to be good support for the usual types of productivity software such as word processing and the occasional "presentation".
Currently Dell is a brand , just that, nothing more , after exporting all the know how to asia Asus took over, and now there is nothing left except the round logo. Close, move along corporation.
So all a mobile user needs, hardware-wise, to bridge that gap is a keyboard. This can be supplied via an optional "dockable" keyboard.
I can't imagine no keyboard... and having a tablet with a keyboard seems like those combination car/truck things they used to make... and it wasn't any good at either... it was a crappy car and a crappy truck.
It's not just Dell being affected by 'teh iPad!!!' Just look what else Apple's 'magical' device has caused to happen just this week:
* Ron Paul's surging poll numbers in Iowa
* The first signs of the Higgs Boson
* Kobe Bryant's wife filing for divorce
* The end of the Iraq war
Just to name a few.
Ask anyone at your local Starbucks and they will confirm its all true.
I guess you are right. There are plenty of keyboard cases available for them, you can't search a tablet at Amazon without it recommending you one of those. (Even for the EEE.) Also, it makes the keyboard removable, for whatever you want to do without a keyboard (reading a book probably).
But that is not the "only" difference between them. Netbooks must run windows, so their battery life is way lower, and I've not seen a netbook that connects to 3G yet.
Rethinking email
I'm actually considering buying a netbook before the next semester starts. I've used my 17" and 15.6" laptops to take notes during my lectures, and when I'm in a big lecture hall with large tables, either one works fine, but when I'm usually in a regular classroom with regular desks, they are both too big to be practical. I've also tried using my android tablet with keyboard-case to take notes, and it just ended up being a PITA. While it may work for some people, its not for me. An iPad is not an option for me. So, instead of taking notes by hand, which is a pain in the hand, I'll probably be picking up a decent cheap netbook. Not because I want a full time laptop (which I already have), or want to play games on it (which is what my desktop is for), but because it's the best tool for the job. Pretty much all it will have installed is an office suite, web browser, and any software required for my classes. It doesn't matter that for another $50, I can get a 15.6" dual core laptop with decent ram and storage. I don't need any of that. I am sure there are others that feel the same. The netbook may not be practical for everybody, but it does have its use, especially at the ~$200 price range.
Pretty much. There isn't much I don't need a keyboard for, and when I'm watching something it doubles as a 'tablet support device'.
On the el camino front - due to the same fact that leads people to believe Australia will survive nuclear war, they also missed the memo that "utes" are out of style.
see here.
Sent from my PDP-11
iPad killed the netbook market.
I doubt it. Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing Acer continue with their Aspire One line either. They'd be just focusing on their Iconia tablet line.
When a bunch of vendors try to create/enter a new market, and then most of them change their minds, I think it is fair to say the market "died" to some degree. It may be more accurate to say that tablets killed the market. The iPad being the first demonstrable case of a tablet being effective competition to a netbook. Its hard to image a potential netbook customer not wondering if a tablet would be a better idea.
Personally I find an iPad with an external bluetooth keyboard to be quite capable at the simple word processing and spreadsheet tasks one might use a netbook for.
I think a tablet is a complementary product for desktops and laptops, and it is a competing product for netbooks. I also think this will eventually change. In the future I expect some tablet device to basically be somewhat similar to the CPU "box" of a desktop. When mobile it acts like a tablet, when at your desk in its dock its just the "CPU" with external storage, keyboard and display connecting to it. Not terribly different than connecting a laptop to a full sized keyboard and monitor when at your desk.
Plenty of netbooks connect to 3G.
My HP mini 5102 does, for example.
And it has 8+ hrs of battery life. And it runs Windows 7 so I still get Office, and all my other native windows apps (including ones I need for my job, like vSphere Client.)
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
The only difference between a netbook and a tablet is a keyboard.
That and the operating system, and the manufacturer's restrictions if any on what applications may be run.
On the software side, there needs to be good support for the usual types of productivity software such as word processing and the occasional "presentation".
But very little for the apps that I run. Yeah, I know, sample size of one, but is there a counterpart to, say, IDLE (a Python code editor and debugger) on Android or iOS? Before I go out and buy a tablet to run SL4A, how good is SL4A?
The only difference between a netbook and a tablet is a keyboard.
That and the operating system, and the manufacturer's restrictions if any on what applications may be run.
That and the fact that you can tilt a netbook and nothing happens. And the touch screen.
And of course all of these features together: a small but wide screen that can be tilted might also be bearable for text, a small screen that doesn't is a pain and only useful for people without friends to watch movies.
Here in South America, netbooks outsell notebooks by a wide margin. They are much more capable than cheap tablets of the same price and much cheaper than actual fully featured computers. They are also used a lot by business people who don't really want to carry around a full computer.
With so many manufacturers setting their sites on mobile devices, ultra-light/portable laptops/netbooks are going the way of dodo. Yet, Google is still trying to expand its Chromebook line of netbook which are, in essence, overpriced netbooks that only run Google Chrome.
Try the Transformer Prime. It has a dockable keyboard. Or get a Bluetooth keyboard for your other tablet. Using it like a tablet is just the USP. It's a form factor, not a religion. You can attach stuff to your tablet. We just mostly do that wireless now, and only when we want or need to.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The subject line of your post was "price..." The subject line of my reply is "profit..."
Say that on a TV game show you're asked to name as many luxury cars as possible in 60 seconds. It's easy: Cadillac, Rolls-Royce, Lexus, Porsche, ... Notice how almost all of those have been on the market for a really, really long time. Now try the same thing with low-end cars. Uh, ... Chevette, Hyundai Excel, VW Bug, AMC Gremlin, ... Notice how most of those are no longer on the market.
The similar tension, uncertainty, and chaos at the bottom end of the PC price spectrum is not a new phenomenon. The computer analogs of the Chevette et al. are machines like the Great Quality (ca. 1997), and the Everex GPC (ca. 2008). Notice how those are no longer on the market.
It's really, really hard to stay in business when your profit margin is low.
Basically the only way to make a $200 computer (desktop or netbook) is something like this. You produce them in Asia, where labor costs are low. You avoid R&D like the plague. You have nobody working for you who has the slightest expertise in software. You don't write documentation. You don't do support. You have a web site that's only in Chinese, and it has no useful content. You make your hardware specs so low that it takes 30 or 45 seconds for a browser to start up.
Why would it be a surprise that users then fail to beat a path to your door? Your sales are low, and your profits are low. You go out of business.
Find free books.
I am frequently part of a Nagios on-call rotation. I brought a netbook with me nearly everywhere I went to respond to outages. I use them because they are light and I don't have to worry about the cost of them if they get stolen or ruined in a bike crash. I've been through 3 of them so far.
/.ers are familiar with dysfunctionality of Dell's networking, SAN and NAS offerings which cannot be so cheaply replaced as a netbook.
Dell's keyboard was absolutely awful for syntax-heavy shell operations. I write a dizzying sequence of regular expressions as part of regular maintenance operations, complicated by frequent escapes because I typically was so goddamned drunk that if I used quotes I would forget whether I was nesting quotes or not, or if I was in the middle of a quoted string at all. Dell's keyboard was absolutely unbearable, and I could not use it to write bash while wasted at a bar with dead in the water infrastructure which is basically the single most important function of a netbook.
I spent about 3 weeks with a Dell netbook because the CFO of our company said we were going all-Dell because we got some pittance of a discount. I said I would no longer be on-call until I got an Acer Aspire One (best shellscripting netbook keyboard, hands down) and it was about 3 days until one got ordered. This doesn't even begin to touch the idiocy of the Dell-only rule, as I'm sure plenty of
Anyways, Dell got out of this market because nobody wanted to buy their garbage netbooks, with good reason. In fact, the only computer from a major manufacturer that I can tolerate in this size/weight profile is the Macbook Air-- and it doesn't even remotely begin to compete on price. Losing/wrecking a $300 device is one thing, when an identically configured machine costs $1400 its a much bigger deal.
I bought a Dell Mini 9 a few years back for 149 pounds and I still use it regularly - more than I use my last purchase, a firesale HP TouchPad. In fact, my Xmas present this year is to be a replacement battery for the Mini 9 because it's only charging to less than half its original capacity.
What seemed to happen after my Mini 9 purchase was that netbooks with 9/10" screens started to get rarer, solid state drives (essential for a netbook surely?) disappeared, netbooks got more expensive (barely cheaper than a low-end laptop) and then tablets turned up (though I personally think the netbook form is far more productive than a tablet).
What I'd like to see is the original netbook spec come back. but beefed up a bit:
* A low price (must be lower than a cheap laptop).
* Dual core 64-bit processor.
* Upgradeable to at least 4GB RAM.
* Solid state drive (32GB isn't that expensive now).
* Either a normal 9/10" screen or a touchscreen variant (for Windows 8/Android/whatever).
* No fan! The entire netbook must be solid state - no moving parts.
* Linux pre-installed so at least we know there's Linux drivers for it.
Bring that in at under 200 pounds/$300 and I'm interested. A shame Dell isn't an option now because they got it right with the Mini 9, IMHO.
Before I go out and buy a tablet to run SL4A, how good is SL4A?
Sl4a is great. The only real problem is not being able to pass command line arguments to your scripts and the inability to create a solid GUI interface. That having been said, I wrote a killer barcode app that interfaces with Amazons ecs api. Whipped it up in python in a few days and have made a ton of money with it.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
the trouble is because they're smaller people want to pay less. Odd thing really, since it used to be the other way around :). But then again there's also the perception of less functionality. Whatever. But I think it was Sony that made the point that netbooks are bad for the industry. They drive down the value / price and profit margin of regular laptops. Dell's big enough they compete with themselves. My guess would be they were finding that cheap netbooks were cannibalizing the sale of more expensive laptops. Especially the high end ones with longer battery life...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Really? People use netbooks frequently in the developing world now? When I was living in Latin America a decade ago, computer use was so low that calligraphy was still a valid career choice.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
iPad killed the netbook market.
At this point, you'd be more accurate (still not accurate though), to say that the iPad killed the TABLET market. The netbook market is still very much alive...
And Dell killed the Dell tablet and netbook market... doesn't mean that either the tablet *or* netbook market is dead, just that Dell is...
Whoa, Dell's still around....?! I had no idea... (really!)
We live, as we dream -- alone....
I have an Acer Aspire One D250 that I got from the refurbished bin at Microcenter like a year and half ago or so and I love that little beast. It's running 10.04.3 Lucid. I put a 500GB hard drive in it and I basically use it as a portable storage device for movies and music but the thing that really sets it apart is that it will rip a DVD. So, its a lot more functional than a tablet. Of course, Dell is a mass market kind of company, so a boutique item like netbooks aren't really in their purview but if you can pick one up for a couple of hundred bucks like I did then you get a device that is a zillion times more useful than a freakin Kindle Fire. I can read books with Kindle Cloud reader in Firefox AND I can edit sound files with Audacity.,,, just to give an example. I just recently got a Samsung with an E-450 processor (running Mint 12) not because I needed a better computer than the Acer but because I wanted a bigger screen... the two computers together give me just about everything I could want in portable computing for a total weight of about 7 pounds. I think weight is probably one of the most important factors now. I am not going to spend 1000 dollars on a Mac Book Air when I can buy four or five of these little computers.
if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?
There is ALWAYS a comma before a conjunction hat joins two clauses. Comma is sometimes used before a conjunction that joins a list. All of the following are correct.
John hit the ball, and he celebrated.
Hohn hit the ball and celebrated.
John hit the ball, stood on his hands, and celebrated.
John hit the ball, the wall, and the shawl.
John, Bill, and Sara celebrated.
There are lots of commas in front of and.
Sometimes one doesn't exactly need a computer equivalent to a MacBook Air, nor a development platform for iPhone or iPad apps, just a small computer in general. A cheap 10" laptop running Windows or Xubuntu fills this role. Apple has just chosen not to target the extreme low end. So please allow me to rephrase: You just have to somehow convince the one holding your purse strings that a computer equivalent to a MacBook Air is worth the price tag compared to a low-end ASUS or Acer.
The netbook has always struck me as the stupidest computing idea I'd ever heard of. A "machine" with a screen too small to see, a keyboard too small for my fingers, and too little memory or power for anything more complex than browsing a website.
The pad is a far more effective form factor for serving that ultra-portable not-a-real-machine market.
The netbook was the mutant offspring of low power CPUs and the evil dreams of a wanna-be marketing overlord, not sound engineering or impressive technology.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Tablets are more oriented towards media consumption -- games, video, that sort of thing.
Wow, someone still labors under that misconception? Who thawed you out of cyro-sleep?
First of all, tablets never had the problems you mentioned. Even back in the distant days of Windows tablets artists liked them. Now with the iPad that is still true, but it's useful for so much more content creation beyond art - movies, music, and even REAL writers find they like to use the iPad for serious writing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes and no. Flash drives (both inside laptops and inside tablets) killed the low cost netbook market (not that it killed it completely, but it put a serious damper on it).
Flash drives make laptops and tablets thinner and weight less, not just because they're smaller and weight less themselves, although that's part of it, but because they don't require those large batteries and they keep a charge for longer so you usually don't have to lug around an extra bulky power adapter with you.
Not to mention, they start up almost instantly, and since most of the time you're not worried about losing the entire charge, not having to hunt down a power outlet when you're at a coffee shop is one extra less hassle you have to contend with.
And yes, you could argue that the iPad killed the netbook market, but personally if I see a colleague desperately trying to take notes during a meeting with his iPad, I certainly feel more pity for him than envy. Why use a iPad for taking notes when you could easily be using a Macbook Pro, a Chromebook/Notebowook, or simply a pen and paper (sometimes even any ballpoint pen plus a napkin would be better). And unless you're a salesman and actually need a nice display device for your quick one-on-one sales presentations, or are on TV and are playing some kind of uber-cool CSI detective, there is no reason for you to be using an iPad to peck your notes awkwardly into.
And yes, I understand you can set up a nice little keyboard and a nice little stand for your iPad, but really what's the point of the simplicity of the iPad if you have to carry around and set up a bunch of fragile accessories almost everywhere you go. For me, even the screen unlocking gesture is one gesture too many for taking notes, I much prefer flipping my laptop open and see it magically light up in less than a second or two, while having access to the mechanical keyboard at the very same time it lights up.
Until I have no more need for a keyboard. I don't see that in the foreseeable future, so I'm sticking with my netbook for university. You lug a 15" computer 2km back and forth every day and tell me you don't want something lighter.
The battery life is where most of the value lies anyways. 9 hours of battery life means I can leave the damn thing on all day and never have to worry about running low.
Bah! You newfangled kiddies and your tablets sicken me!
The Dell Mini is/was the PERFECT netbook to make into a Hackintosh, because it was 100% compatible.
I have an aver NetBoot I got on clearance at target last year. I used it a lot Neil work got me an iPad. The NetBoot is not downstairs hooked up to a few USB drives happily receiving backups from my desktop and wife's computer and serving up music to my squeeze box. It's probably using a lot less power than the aging and full terastation it replaced. I had wanted to build a new NAS of some sort, but the NetBoot works fine, if not a little slow.
I wonder how much of the drop in laptop/netbook sales is due to the massive portable media avaiable?
Lately I have found myself carrying around a portable HDD that is 1TB in size and carries almost all of my data. I don't really have to take my laptop to school, when I can just take everything with me and plug my drive in to a school computer.
No need for an 'on-the-go' computer, and it works for sharing files with friends, between my multiple computers, etc.
Dell is good but it can't compete hp,apple and Sony..Mostly i pad killed the dell market..
Try typing an average of 180 characters per minute on a tablet and then repeat what you just said. Then try it 10 hours without a charge and see if you can still use that tablet to post your reply here.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I bought a Dell Inspiron Mini for uni because I wanted battery life. However I found it only lasted for like 5 hours and it sucked at 1080p. While I was in Indonesia I was checking out Macbook's in an Apple Store. I found them all lightweight, thin and I knew they had excellent 10 hour battery life. So I bought my self I a 1300k Macbook pro. Problem solved. Great battery life, great for movies, USB ports, doesn't overheat while playing games and a DVD drive and in fact it also works quite nice as a computer. I can do all the word processing/excel I want for hours and hours without being tethered to a power cord. It is the best laptop I have ever had. Previously I had a Dell Inspiron 1520. It overheated when playing games, battery life was low and it was extremely large and bulky. I am not Pro Mac OSX or Pro Windows. I like the quality of my Macbook pro. This is 2011 laptop quality should not be a problem anymore. It's not a price thing it's more I don't want to have these problem like bulk, weight and battery life in a laptop anymore and still have the same performance. This is what Dell really needs to work on.
All i want is a 10-12" screen, 32-64G SSD, 3G and WiFi and a decent keyboard. I can put a low resource guzzling linux distro on it and do all of my work and some browsing and multi media on it. That way, 10+ hours of battery life wouldn't cost over $250. All that is for sale, is something with built in speakers, a webcam, a hard disk, preinstalled windows way too much USB, HDMI and whatnot ports, way too powerful CPUs and a screen resolution that requires most people to use a magnifying glass to actually use to the fullest when doing text editing. Those things add to cost, without making the computers useful for 90% of people that want an ultra portable machine on a budget.
India can make a sub $100 computer but hasn't started production, the OLPC failed because a lot of companies started getting involved. I think the industry doesn't want us to have cheap computers, because there's no profit in it for them. There is a market of billions for netbooks, but you won't be able to get any money out of them (in the first year or two) once you've sold it. Companies don't look further than one or two years, because there's no shareholder value in looking ahead that far. I think that's what is happening here. The fact that you'll get a lot of people using computers, triggering an economic change that would almost certainly benefit the manufacturers of said netbooks, well, who really cares about that?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
In your world there are only two classes of people
No, people are distinct.
Except for Apple Hater that is. Apple Haters show the same exact qualities of ignorance across the board -almost as if a hive mind were involved. A particularly emotional and uneducated hive-mind, but still.
So to recap, there are many different kinds of people but Apple haters have chosen to ditch that distinctiveness in their fog of hate.
I note you didn't even respond to my point - which is another sign of the Appel Hater, since they are incapable of processing new information (which is why they cannot retain even information a decade old like macs supporting multiple mouse buttons). As is whining about how people talk about their being labeled Apple Haters.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
On one of the many iPad speed typing applications I can hit 34 wpm typing on glass without even warming up (97% accuracy), with an average of about six characters per word that's 204 cpm, above the number you requested...
I can understand how you might not understand that to be possible typing on some other laggy tablet. But on a "tablet" (I will not use the "i" word) with good response you can type really quickly since fast typing relies on muscle memory for key locations, NOT the shapes of keys (pay attention when you touch type - you don't feel out keys, you hit them).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The PC industry hates netbooks because they're so cheap. For about a year, it looked like the future of personal computing was going to be $100 netbooks sold in bubble-packs in drugstores. There were desperate efforts to sell "more computer per computer".
Despite industry hostility, netbooks continue to get better. The entry-level ASUS netbooks are quite capable. I have the $266 model, the 1011 PX, and it will run programs like Blender and LTSpice, which were once considered heavy-duty applications. If you're doing actual work, instead of passively consuming entertainment, you need a real keyboard.
The idea of "netbook" is a small laptop that is not intended to work as a desktop replacement. The original netbook, OLPC, was an educational project, however there is nothing that prevents this class of devices from being used as consuner (facebook/youtube/media/text editing) or business (web applications, note taking) device.
Now, what all those three groups of applications have in common? They GIVE ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING REASON TO RUN WINDOWS. But noooo. Dell just had to market those netbooks the same way Microsoft marketed Windows CE/Mobile/Phone -- "they run Wiiiiindows!!!". Except, of course, Microsoft was lying through its teeth because no Windows application would run on a phone, and netbook manufacturers were only half lying because Windows applications would run, just crippled by lack of desktop screen resolution and performance.
Apple and e-book readers' manufacturers had proven that consumers have absolutely no problem buying devices with ridiculously low performance, as long as those devices are intended and marketed for uses where such performance is appropriate. Thousands of bluetooth keyboard makers demonstrated that the most overpriced and crippled netbook ever -- a combination of iPad and a bluetooth keyboard in a leather case -- is a viable product. Now, Dell, Acer, MSI and other faithful Microsoft servants JUST HAD TO STUFF WINDOWS 7 WHERE IT DOES NOT BELONG, and then feel surprised that a $400 device with $250 functionality does not sell.
Let it be a lesson for future hardware manufacturers -- if it's not a business or home desktop, or an equivalent of one, don't ever plan to ship it with Microsoft software.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Let me know when they unload their surplus production run for $99 a pop.
And cycle through three CEOs in short order.
Have gnu, will travel.
Watch this and you'll see why Dell's fscked.
http://gartner.mediasite.com/mediasite/play/9cfe6bba5c7941e09bee95eb63f769421d?t=1320659595
This idea that because Dell isn't doing them somehow they are "dead" is stupid. Dell is a big company no doubt but their mainstay is desktops and in particular corporate systems. I can understand why too, they do corporate support right.
They were never big in the Netbook market. They got in it late, never really had very good offerings, and so on. ASUS is the real big name in netbooks. Acer, MSI, and HP are also all quite big, and Samsung is in there as well.
What with working at a university in IT, I know a ton of people with Netbooks. Of those, precisely 0% have a Dell netbook. It just isn't a big brand for it. Some of these people have Dell desktops or laptops, but not a Dell netbook.
I've never recommended a Dell netbook to anyone, I've never found it to be the best product for a task. Someone else always had something that was cheaper, faster, a better package, whatever.
One of our students just got herself a new Netbook. Ended up getting an ASUS. For what she wanted, it was the best offering.
They are used here the same way they are used there. Some people use them because they don't want to carry around a big computer. Others because they need a real computer but want it cheap. My dad has a Netbook for that reason. He wanted a portable computer, but his needs are simple and he wanted to spend a low amount. A Netbook was perfect.
In my observation, Netbooks are bought by people who want a small, cheap, computer for whatever reason. Usually to do work on. Tablets are bought by people who want a toy to play with. Nothing wrong with that, but I don't see people using their tablets for work related purposes, I do see them using their Netbooks as such.
I "ditched" Dell years ago...Allthe make now is expensive (cheap ly made shoddy) junk! Gee...Reminds me of (CR)Apple!!
And yes, you could argue that the iPad killed the netbook market, but personally if I see a colleague desperately trying to take notes during a meeting with his iPad, I certainly feel more pity for him than envy. Why use a iPad for taking notes when you could easily be using a Macbook Pro, a Chromebook/Notebowook, or simply a pen and paper (sometimes even any ballpoint pen plus a napkin would be better).
The negative of using laptops at meetings is it's like everybody builds a little wall in front of themselves. Meetings are supposed to bring people together to communicate, but laptops distance them.
And people have all sorts of different types of meetings, but unless you're the one taking minutes, I don't find there's much note taking to be done. Jot down the odd diary date, and the odd to-do.
NVIDIA, people want games not stick man pie throwing competitions! Once robbed, twice shy ...
ARM won't work because people demand to use their existing proprietary applications, whose publishers decline to recompile them for Linux on ARM. As for Atom, there are rumors on the Internets that Intel prices Atom CPUs based on the size of the device's screen.
Neither does a cell phone if you keep it in wifi only mode.
But then you have to deal with the retail price of an unsubsidized smartphone, which exceeds that of a netbook.
And a netbook with access to the cell network for increased connectivity will be just as expensive.
Netbooks need the "increased connectivity" less than cell phones do. If you have a netbook, you can use apps that happen not to be ported to cell phones. To run a "desktop" app on a cell phone, you need a data plan over which to run VNC.
It's not only about high speed rail, it's also about buses and subways.
In some cities in the United States, there are 59 days out of the year when public transit does not run. For example, Citilink buses in Fort Wayne, Indiana, do not run at night or on Saturday evenings. Nor do they run on Sundays, six major national holidays, or the day of the annual city parade. In some parts of town, they don't run at all on Saturdays. A car helps people run errands even on the weekends.
If you're a proper touch typist, then yes, you do feel them. See those little nubs on F and J? Those are for orientation.
If you just need to type a few repeated letters ("oh noooo"), you can just tap the key repeatedly a few times. If you really need to type long strings of repeated letters (can't think of an application for this, but that's not to say there isn't one), you can turn off the alternate character thing discussed above.
There really are some annoying aspects to Lion, but I've found that I can turn them all off. And some of the features are quite nice.
I cannot help but to agree. I bought my Dell Inspiron Mini because it came preloaded with Ubuntu Linux. I have since upgraded Ubuntu to the next LTS version. It is a wonderful, stable and solid machine that I travel with. It runs all the diagnostic and development software I need for work as well as any communication and entertainment applications that keep me amused during and between flights. Although not a speed demon, it is still has a reasonably snappy performance. I tried to replace it with the EEEPad Transformer, but for all it's whiz-bang features Transformer/Android cannot match my Inspiron Mini/Ubuntu for sheer usefulness and flexibility.
Yep, there's many netbooks with integrated 3G.
Well in the case of the iPad, Apple already had apps from the iphone that ran without even needing to be recompiled. So infact they did what MS did - They leveraged their existing platform with existing successful applications and existing user-demand to create a new market segment.
Also the reason for decreased performance is *NOT* the OS. Its the pre-loaded shit that the OEMs put on it.. What they should have done is kept the stock NT kernel (which BTW can run even on a router spec SBC.) and replaced the shell with a custom UI that allowed you to install & launch regular win32 apps from their (OEM or MS) own repository. The only way an app would be accepted into this restircted set is if it is not CPU/Memory/IO intensive, doesn't install kernel components, etc.
I don't necessarily disagree with your general idea, but don't agree with your inflammatory language and tone.