Does 2012 Mark the End of the Netbook?

Voline writes "Digitimes reports that Asus and Acer will not be producing netbooks in 2013, signaling the end of a product category that Asus began five years ago with its Eee PC. The Guardian looks at the rise and fall of the netbook and posits some reasons for its end. Reasons include: manufacturers shifting from Linux to Windows, causing an increase in price that brought netbooks into competition with full-on laptops that offered better specs for not much more money; the global recession beginning in 2008; and the introduction of the iPad and Android tablets."

Comments

Re:2010 was the end

[cheesybagel]

So in your mind 7" tablets are a bait and switch as well.

We can't have anything nice

[Cajun Hell]

The worst netbook is better than the best tablet. Yet the tablet market survives. Lame. :(

People get boners over amazingly awful garbage, but make that same machine better by putting a keyboard on it so that a simple task doesn't have to be a tedious time-wasting exercise in touchscreen typing, and then also put a non-toy, more capable OS (GNU/Linux instead of Android, or Mac OS X instead of iOS) on it, and suddenly it's not sexy anymore.

WTF is wrong with you perverts? You see a sheep and a hot babe and all you can say is "baa-aa-aahh! c'm'ere sexy baa-aa-aa-aah!" Gene Wilder's character in that Woody Allen movie was meant to be absurd, not your role model. Fuckwits.