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Can Crowdfunding Bring Back The Netbook? (salon.com)
"The mini-laptop's market niche got swamped by the iPad and the phablet," writes Salon, since the stripped-down hardware of tablets made them cheaper to produce. But now netbooks could be making a grassroots-fueled comeback, "thanks to the lower costs in electronics manufacturing and the fact that individual investors can come together to crowdfund projects." An anonymous reader quotes Salon:
Michael Mrozek, the Germany-based creator of creator of the DragonBox Pyra, says "I never understood why they were gone in the first place. I have no idea why you would use a tablet. I tried one, and it's awkward to use it for anything else than browsing the Web"... He has already managed to raise several hundred thousand dollars through a private pre-order system set up on his geek's paradise online store. Once those initial orders have been filled, Mrozek said he will probably start up a mainstream crowdfunding campaign for his Linux handheld... "The niche was always there, but thanks to the Internet and crowdfunding, it's easy to reach everyone who's interested in such a device so even a niche product still gets you enough users to sell it. That wasn't possible 10 years ago."
Meanwhile, in just under two weeks Planet Computer raised $446,000 on Indiegogo, more than double the original $200,000 goal for their netbook-like Gemini computer (with a keyboard designed by the creator of the original Psion netbook). Planet's CEO Janko Mrsic-Flogel says "It's a bit like Volkswagen bringing back the Beetle," and predicts that the worldwide demand for netbooks could reach 10 million a year.
Meanwhile, in just under two weeks Planet Computer raised $446,000 on Indiegogo, more than double the original $200,000 goal for their netbook-like Gemini computer (with a keyboard designed by the creator of the original Psion netbook). Planet's CEO Janko Mrsic-Flogel says "It's a bit like Volkswagen bringing back the Beetle," and predicts that the worldwide demand for netbooks could reach 10 million a year.
small? yes, keyboard comfy enough? some, specs?, piece of shit machines that were locked to having max 2 gb ram, who the fuck thought that was ever a good idea
Do we really want (or need) the Netbook back? As I recall, they were a product that did little more than make people wish they had saved the money to buy something that was actually capable of meeting their basic needs. These days everyone has a cellphone which is already infinitely better than the netbook of yesterday.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Given that, at the time they both launched, the described use cases for tablets and netbooks didn't really overlap much... it's hard to see how one could blame tablets for the failure of netbooks. It's really only been the past two or three years that there's been any traction with regards to "iPads as word processors" - and, even now, I don't see this done very often.
In our university department, I know a number of people who bought netbooks because they were small, light, and inexpensive. What they then found out was they were also severely underpowered and had too little built-in storage and memory. One of our professors brought one to us and said "I want to run Cadence and Matlab on this" - yeah, good luck with that.
It seemed like none of the people who bought them actually kept using them for more than a month or two.
There are lots of small, light, and useable laptops on the market now. If there ever was a "netbook niche", I'm not sure it still exists.
#DeleteChrome
In my opinion, netbooks went into oblivion when Windows became the OS of choice by the manufacturers. There are other factors to take into as well, like very slow HDDs that hold more data (nice for marketing purposes) rather than SDDs, and poor TN-film screens.
As I would imagine a lot of people are not fans either, they are slow, even the current models, the screens are small, which would be ok if their resolution didnt suck, keyboards are hard to type on, and they are heavier than their tablet counterparts
sent from a 12 inch 1.2ghz netbook cause I just happen to be hacking one up to use in a mini mame cab
Asus still makes them. Transformer. I've got 2 of them and love em. They are not powerhouse machines, but bang for buck, I'm more than pleased. Same footprint as the original Asus Eee 10" netbooks but maybe half as thick. And you can pop the screen off the keyboard and use it as a tablet..... to which I rarely ever do that. Look on Amazon, you can find them for around $300-ish. I suggest getting the one with 4 gigs of ram.
Netbooks are cheap, almost disposable, laptops with small screens. Today all you can get are cheap, almost disposable, laptops with medium sized screens.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I would like to see netbooks come back. The original concept was a smash hit- small size, excellent battery life, SSD, and running Linux, all at a small price. Lots of reasons led to their demise- Microsoft hostility, powerful phones, tablets, and client-side browser load increase were probably the three biggest.
I think there might still be a market for something small, inexpensive, and different. Maybe not a big market, but something with unlocked dual-boot Android and Linux with physical keyboard, larger than the largest phones but smaller than the smallest laptops (notebooks). Where having a keyboard and good, SWAPPABLE battery trumps being stupidly thin.
Oh, the Gemini PDA isn't it... too expensive, too small. Cool, no doubt, but it is more of a phone factor.
No tilde? No backtick? This would just annoy me on Linux.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Oh wait, it's basically a small, low powered, awful screen version of a 2-in-1 tablet with a keyboard. The consumer space between cheap, entry level 13" laptop and tablet/2-in-1 with detachable keyboard / keyboard case is pretty small. I had a spare netbook until a few years ago (gave it to a buddy for a case of craft beer I couldn't get at home). Literally the only thing from keeping me to use my original iPad as a netbook is that many of the apps I'd use require a new iOS version. Resolution isn't admittedly that great but you can pick up an iPad 3rd gen with a keyboard for under 200 bucks and it has double the resolution. If you're willing to go Android, that price drops even further.
Now we've got airs that have 11.6" screens, fully integrated keyboard, and weigh a few ounces more than ye olde macbooks.
I never understood why they were gone in the first place. I have no idea why you would use a tablet. I tried one, and it's awkward to use it for anything else than browsing the Web
Unlike netbooks, which were awkward to use for anything including browsing the web. It was codeword for a really cheap, really crappy laptop with a tiny and poor screen, an anemic Atom processor, too little RAM and the slowest HDD you could find. No laptop user would choose it unless they very literally can't afford anything better, I had one because I normally use a desktop and just needed a cheap piece of shit I wouldn't spend much on and could afford to lose/damage. My use case is now fully replaced by a smartphone, I don't even need a tablet/phablet. Besides, aren't Chromebooks the current day netbooks? Or if you really want they have netbooks with Win10. Not that I'd touch that with a ten foot pole.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Tablets and ebook readers already do everything the so called "netbook" does. What exactly are you going to get rid of to reduce the cost further?
About the only way I can think of to reduce the price that can't be applied to a tablet/ebook reader is to:
1) Remove the touch screen and add back in a mouse
2) Increase the thickness of the hardware, to allow for cheaper parts.
I can't see that working. The touch screen is worth the extra cost, and no one wants a thicker, heavier tablet, unless it is less than $40. I can't see it working.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Or you can buy a tablet and a roll-up keyboard. Get the worst of both worlds. Anyone I knew who bought a netbook bought them because they were cheaper than laptops - they're a niche product whose niche is gone. Or do you really think people are going to bother toting around netbooks instead of phones and tablets? (or if they need a laptop, a phone and laptop)?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I loved the EEE PC, for me, it was a way to run any distro I wanted on a portable device that I could bring anywhere. I would often bring it with me whenever I needed to showcase my work.
However, I feel as if what replaced it for most people (that did not just get them to save a buck), was single-board systems like RPI. I would always plug in an external monitor + keyboard on these things anyway, because their keyboards and screens were just waaaaaaay to small to do anything useful.
The 1GB RAM or the 2GB RAM currently offered by most Chromebooks etc, are just way to low, I would love to see a 4-8GB RAM netbook running on Intel HW for a decent price (100-150USD), but if that does not happen, I'll stick to my 15-17" laptop, even if its often impractial.
yep. free. rescued a Tablet from the trash last week (well, they were going to throw it in the trash). my Netbook was my nephew's.
Aaaand - you missed the point. This is not for consumers. It's for ... well, keyboard junkies. For anyone who routinely tries to type on a small phablet and who wants a clamshell system. I'd love one if I had any use for it. If I were needing some sort of portable text terminal, if I had to create and respond to complex emails away from a real computer, if I were a closet Blackberry fan - I'd love one.
I still like it. Since I'm not doing anything like this at present, it doesn't really appeal to me. But there were times when I would have committed at least four of the seven sins to get one.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
During a time when I "worked from home", I would travel frequently. On one such trip, my laptop I used for work died. I needed one ASAP, so ordering online wasn't an option. I walked into BestBuy (not really any other option with where I was at the time). I just needed something to get me by until I returned home to my normal workstation, so I pick up a cheap Acer Aspire One 10" netbook for $300. This was I think five or six years ago now. This netbook is awesome, it has 2 DIMM slots in it, so I was able to move over the 8GiB of RAM from the dead laptop over to the netbook. All these years later, the thing is still working like a champ. It fits nicely instead of my camera backpack and use it to dump photos while on the go, with slow but functional support for the latest Lightroom and Photoshop. The thing also has wired gigabit ethernet, so it always travels with me when I'm working on-site for tech clients. Had a city-wide power outage recently where I was able to quickly hop into the server room with this thing, plug it in, and get to work monitoring the rack of server, AV, and phone equipment while running on emergency power.
Looking at what is being offered by the link provided, it is just yet ANOTHER random Android device. Cool, I guess? But it wouldn't be able to do any of the actual WORK that I would need it to do. It is essentially just a phone/tablet with an attached keyboard. If I wanted that, there are things like the Transformer Prime from Asus. Or if I wanted to shell out actual money, there are Surface tablets from Microsoft. The thing being offered now adds no real functionality over the existing offerings whatsoever.
I have a Lenovo X131e, that I replaced the HDD with an SSD, that gets more use than my tricked out desktop machine. It runs Win7 x64, is mostly used for browsing, but can handle anything from Word to pro audio just fine. It's not tiny or superlight, but it's just the right size to carry around the house, and it's built like a tank.
A tablet is just an oversized phone, but a netbook is really useful.
That's what the majority of people used a computer/laptop for, before tablets took over.
#DeleteFacebook
Loved this. A updated replacement would be nice.
Just go to Walmart and buy one -- HP Stream, etc.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
tablets with bluetooth keyboards caught up with them quickly on price/performance as long as you don't mind working on ios or android, ASUS even makes the transformer tablet that actually docks to the keyboard if you need more rigidity than a tablet with a flip case
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I have keyboards that cost more than some netbooks. If I want a small lightweight laptop, I'll get a 12-inch sub-notebook like the macbook air or thinkpad x270. It doesn't have to be cheap if it can hold up and last me a long time.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Perhaps that's true for the people you know. When I was a student, having a tiny lightweight computer with a real keyboard that ran a real OS was great for writing papers and code. Not so much for compiling huge programs, but a little python work? No problem. Having an Ethernet port built in and all the standard Linux network utilities came in handy more than once for onsite network troubleshooting.
Not bad for such a small machine. Oh yeah, I guess it was inexpensive as well. So yeah, netbooks are useless.
Tablets and phablets didn't kill netbooks alone, pricing and other options did.
I imagine some Linux hardcore users would want a cheap-o laptop with paltry specs to tinker with, but the majority of the market is not interested in that.
With netbooks, you could at most browse a bit, check e-mails and do the very basic stuff that any smartphone or tablet can do better today, even the extremely cheap ones. And then, with the advent of Chromebooks, you can even get a Windows 10 laptop positioned to compete with it, with prices under 200 bucks.
I don't think a single guy experience on trying to use an Android tablet for productivity and finding it "awkward" is reason enough to ressurect a line of products that are justifiably dead. Honestly, plenty of people can use Android tablets for productivity well enough, and keyboard accessories ranging from horrible to excellent are already out there. Go on eBay and search for Android laptop if form factor is an issue. Android already has a cleaner and more intuitive interface, and apps like the full Microsoft Office suite, with data synchronization and other native features to boot.
Nowadays you can also get cheap Windows laptops, tiny desktops like a Kangaroo PC (there's even a Kangaroo laptop with a weird design), stick computers or even something like Gole 1 that can dual boot between Windows and Android.
You can build your own portable with something like a Raspberry Pi.
Not to mention Chromebooks among other devices for productivity.
Honestly, I think it's kinda stupid to try to revive netbooks at this point, personal opinion as a business thing. It'll be an extremely niche market that will fail to scale.
I'd be all for a Linux tablet though, for personal usage. Not that I think there's a market for that too. What Linux needs these days is to get ported, adapted and get support for devices like smartphones and tablets, not to keep trying to go back in time. Yes, I know Android is based on Linux, but I'm talking about other distros. I know Ubuntu has a version for mobile devices, but those are too limited and impossible to find in the market.
I'm not a hater or anything like that. I've just converted an old laptop that was laying around into an Ubuntu machine to tinker with. I just don't see a market for netbooks anymore. What we had back then were schools and businesses willing to pay a little for underpowered laptops running Linux for the very basics... but that has changed.
Furthermore, you know what Netbooks sound like for your average consumer? Extremely underpowered and horrible to deal with devices. Garbage. Expired electronics. Failed strategy. Outdated and deprecated. Something lying in a storage space somewhere with a ton of dust on top. A waste of not a whole lot of money. Outside of Linux evangelists, that's what I mostly hear. Would you want a netbook for work/school/business? Ewww no, gtfo of here with that.
I can almost guarantee you that most people, if offered a netbook, would rather:
1. Spend a bit more on a more capable device - Chromebook, Linux or Windows;
2. Get a bluetooth/OtG keyboard and mouse and use their own smartphones/tablets instead;
3. Get nothing and keep using whatever they have instead of having to carry an extra device running an OS that they'll need to learn how to deal with.
Netbooks are dead, let them go gracefully. If you are going to release a new product with similar objectives, call it something else.
Apparently it is "awkward to use it for anything else than browsing the Web"
But guess what 99% of the population want to use their portable device for...
Then add the fact that netbooks are also awkward for almost everything except browsing the web, because the screen and the keyboard are too small.
In addition, browsing the web is better with the screen in portrait mode, than in landscape mode, so the netbook is not even better at that.
I'm sure there are use cases for netbooks, and I loved my Asus netbook when I got it, but I think I have only used it a handful of times since I got myself a Nexus 7
$100 or less, 2-4 GB of RAM, WiFi AND Ethernet, and AMD or x86 option. That's about the only way it will work. Otherwise, your better off building your own Raspberry Pi laptop. 7" touch screens for them are only ~$20-$30. The Pi is about $35. A keyboard with trackpad about $15. An ok web cam about $15. Power supply about $10. You could use a USB battery life extender to make it more "laptopish." They even have solar chargeable ones for $20 now.
Yes too
Walk into any Best Buy or Walmart and there will be a usable $200 Windows netbook I actually had a $200 HP stream 12 for a year and a half. It bundled with a year of Office (which I need, and think is much better than Libre), so that's like $80 off the $200. Worked perfectly for work and browsing web and online grad school. Tiny computer, no moving parts, I would just bring it along on trips without thinking about it. I could play Civ 5 on lowest settings, ha.
The two issues were the 32 Gigs of hard drive, with maybe 20 Gigs free after installing the OS and Office and basic apps. The 32gb drive ensured you would only want the computer if you used it as a 2nd computer or just for the most basic uses, although I guess you could use a USB 3.0 key drive, or an SD card. And the 2 GB of RAM was kind of a limiter, but really not a big deal. I know the latest rendition of the Stream has 4GB of RAM, which I imagine is fine.
I really liked the computer, but when it broke due to much abuse I went for a Macbook. If Windows 10 didn't suck so much I'd probably get another one.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Was it simply the cheapness of netbooks that made them compelling? If so, why do we not consider Chromebooks as having filled that void. Netbooks started out cheap because they ran (stripped down) Linux distros that could run on the minimal hardware. Well, Chromebooks do that today - with fewer compromises in performance (for what they can do). And you can load a full Linux distro on them, so the hackers that loved netbooks are also satisfied.
Of course, Netbooks ultimately changed into cheap Windows PC's once Microsoft felt a threat. But they were lousy Windows PC's and limited to small screens by Microsoft's deal on the cheap OS licenses. Chromebooks are not limited in screen size, have decent keyboards and trackpads and mainly just skimp on local storage these days. So, I guess if you need lots of local storage and/or need to run Windows, then sure - the cheapest mainstream laptops will provide you with a suitably shitty Windows experience. But if you need something that fills the niche that netbooks were originally intended to fill, a Chromebook is the thing - unless, of course, you're fine with a cheap tablet...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Indeed. I can get quite a few "notebooks" here that would have been called "netbooks" during the hype. This seems to be fake news (alternate facts?) designed to make the gullible buy something they can get significantly cheaper elsewhere.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The second you cite Salon, you might as well be quoting Breitbart.
My Acer Aspire One AOA150 is real netbook - Atom N270, 1GB RAM, 1024x600 screen, 120 GB HDD. Cost me $400 back in September, 2008. Not exactly cheap at the time. My HP Stream 11 is a netbook too (I think) - Celeron N2840, 2GB RAM, 1366x768 screen, 32 GB eMMC. Cost me $179 a year and a half ago plus another $20 for a 64 GB mini flash drive. That I'd call that cheap.
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
Most netbooks were full fledged PCs able to run Windows, had ethernet and full-sized USB ports.
What they offer is just a small tablet with a keyboard. In fact you could just buy a small BT keyboard and use the smartphone you already have.
With Windows 8, the assumption that folks would use a touch screen. Win8 didn't port over to Atom based netbooks.
I used an Asus 1000HE netbook for many years with WinXP. It served me well. When XP became old, I moved Win7 to the hardware. It was pretty slow. I tried buying an Asus Netbook running Linux. The software was OK but the hardware was a disappointment (a surprise for Asus as they generally make pretty good hardware). I ended up having to return the unit because it had wireless connectivity problems. I need to move Linux on to one of the netbooks.
I liked the compact size and battery life of the netbooks. I have tablets that I use but they're useless for typing text. Same with phones in my opinion.
Now, I just use a laptop either running Linux or Win7. I like a real keyboard because I type and I write more than one word or one line responses to emails, etc (and here :-) When Win7 goes away, I won't be using a Microsoft solution due to their "phone home" policies and forced update crap. Their days are numbered with me.
The only viable solution I see for netbooks is for them to run Linux.
Microsoft doesn't give a damn about netbooks now, nor did they after WinXP IMHO.
yeah no thanks. Can get a cheapo android tablet for less than 100 and a bluetooth keyboard for like 30.
Netbooks disappeared because the hardware simply wasn't good enough at the time; i should know i have an asus atom netbook gathering dust in a drawer. Once the hardware caught up, was powerful enough without killing the battery within 45 minutes, android tablets took over the market and there doesn't seem any point in going back.
If you want a mobile workstation then get a laptop/ultrabook.
I got a $50 7" Android 6 tablet + a $10 bluetooth universal 7" keyboard & stand. I added a bluetooth mouse. You can add USB OTG for plugging in storage, keyboard, mouse. I can ssh & tunnel to home from Wifi, do google docs, run chrome, ebooks, youtube.
If it had > 1GB RAM, it'd be enough for a remote access laptop. With only 1GB of RAM, it lags when running more than 1 app at a time. Any tablet with more RAM seems to cost as much as a chromebook which I could run Linux on and do more.
If only they had 7" chromebooks.
The problem is that a tablet/phablet is not a decent productivity tool. It's great for media consumption and maybe social media, but lousy for real work. The tools aren't right, the multitasking really isn't right, and most of the bluetooth keyboards are pretty inadequate.
I have an old Acer netbook, circa 2009, that still works well and I'm much more productive on that than I am on my much more expensive tablet.
https://www.amazon.com/Cambio-...
I see things like that all over the place. Tablets with keyboards and touchpads. After I bought a "Pure" tablet I never understood why anyone would buy another one.
Also seeing as you can usually buy these for under a hundred dollars they make great alternatives to microcontrollers like the raspberry pi.
NewEgg has a Lenovo 110S, with Windows 10 and an 11.6 inch screen, for $169. That qualifies as a small screen at a low price.
Look at what just happened with Apple and Samsung. They both had significant problems with their product releases because they were trying to make smartphones that were thinner and had more functionality. Apple had a case warp problem and the S8 was an incendiary device.
Consumers don't give a rat's ass about "thinner" at this point. Given a choice between a thin phone with a shorter batter life and a fatter phone with a longer use time, 99% of the public would want more talk time. But the public doesn't get that choice because Apple and Samsung are engaged in a pissing contest on design aesthetics.
If you don't think this is true, consider the market in battery packs for smart phones. Right now on Amazon there are 22,828 listings for external power for phones. People are carrying around another device just to keep their phones working.
So there is a market for a phone with a longer battery life. This is just one approach. If the smartphone manufacturers had a clue they would be competing on the real world use case of how long the phone works without needed to plug in somewhere. If there was any actual competition in the market this would happen, but effectively it's a duopoly between Samsung and Apple, at least outside of Chine. So we're stuck.
Why is Snark Required?
Netbooks were small, weak Windows laptops costing a couple hundred dollars. That market is very healthy, although it partly moved to 2-in-1's. You can find lots of such products on Chinese stores like Gear Best.
This, on the other hand, is a palmtop. These were small PDA's (remember those) with keyboards. The Psion Series 5MX was one of the best, but there were several Windows CE ones.
This will certainly have an appeal for those (like me) who remember the 5MX fondly, so thanks for posting about it, even with the completely misleading title. I feel that there's less need for palmtops today, given netbooks and keyboard cases for tablets, but I did a lot of story editing on the 5MX, and I'm sure that some people would still find use for a small 400g device with a decent keyboard over the alternatives.
But these days, cheap notebooks are around the price point that Netbooks were at. You can get a cheapass notebook for around $300ish. It won't be very good, but it'll work and be better than what a Netbook was and that was around what they cost.
All a "netbook" ever really meant was "very small, very cheap laptop." I guess if the "very small" part appealed to you then the current crop might not do it, but you can get cheap laptops.
My parents both have cheap Dells. Not the absolute bottom of the barrel, but under $400 in both cases. They aren't great, they aren't fast, but know what? They do the trick for them.
For the price of these netbooks, you can get a lot more.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Productivity tool? I personally would not put anything more than games and basic communication on an object I carry out in public. You forget it somewhere and poof! all your productivity or any personal stuff is gone. But that's just me.
I bought one because it was ickle. It's about the size of a textbook and it fits in a manpurse that I can wear under my coat perfectly. At the time I bought it I was on a lot of site visits & courses and for quickly banging out a spreadsheet it was more than adequate,
Now it has less than a tenth the power of my laptop, but that bastard needs a flatbed to move any substantial distance.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I know tablets with detachable keyboards exist, and there are also 3rd party keyboards.
But they all run arsewank operating systems.
My Eee 1000 boots into Kali when I want to & Win7 when I have to.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You can already buy a netbook equivalent for $350. In fact, I've been consistently using my Kindle HDX with the keyboard cover for the past 4 years.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
"Speech to text" as and argument against using a keyboard? Are you insane?
I still use my Asus EEE PC. Most of the time it is a glorified mp3 player for my workshop that I don't have to worry about charging. It also runs the controlling software for my cnc. When my PC psu died I used it as my primary PC until I got the new machine together. It actually ran my CAD software (Vectric VCarve Pro) just fine, other than a long initial loading time. It has outlasted every other piece of hardware I had at the time I bought it. Ironic because I bought it since it was cheap enough I didn't care about it living in the dusty environment of my shop.
hp still makes a netbook with there stream series. acer still makes the cloud book basically a renamed netbook. lots of china makers still make them, not to mention all those x86 windows tablets. netbooks never died off the fad simply ended and android tablets/phones took many of the roles it did but did it better so you just dont see the market flooded with them anymore.
the atom was not limited to 2gb if the motherboard supported more it could use it.
I see your viewpoint, but some of us work in coffee shops and libraries to avoid the noise and distraction at home.
My sympathies..
Let's face it: the 7-inch and 9-inch displays in the early netbooks were too small, full stop. The small keyboards were somewhat difficult to use even after acclimating to the smaller layout. I have the original Sylvania G netbook which is just an Everex Cloudbook with the touchpad moved to a less stupid location; it is quite hard to type on that thing due to the key size and the 800x480 7-inch screen isn't exactly a spacious work area. (It also had a VIA C7-M 1.2 GHz, a chip notorious for being quite weak when compared to the Intel Atom N230 that went into the first Eee PCs and Acer Aspire Ones, plus a memory limit of 1GB and a 1.8" parallel hard drive. Even with a KingSpec ZIF SSD and an XP install aligned to sector 64 instead of 63 to work with the flash memory better, it struggles hard to even start Firefox...plus it won't boot Windows 7 or later with the default partition layout due to a super inexplicable BIOS bug.)
The 11.6-inch "netbook" of today is the perfect size. The keyboard keys are full-size. The touchpad can be reasonably large. There can be more USB ports. RAM and hard drive upgrades are often possible unless it's one of the Chromebook-based ones with soldered RAM and a 32GB eMMC SSD. The screens are nice and big and always have a minimum resolution width of 1024 pixels, a number which some websites don't even work on without a horizontal scroll bar but which is far better than the 800-pixel screens of the bad old days. They're always thin and light and disposably cheap.
No one in their right mind wants 7-inch netbooks back. Even 9-inch models have squished keyboards and myopia-inducing screens. The 11.6-inch netbook, despite not carrying that label in the marketing literature, is what the market has settled on...and with good reasons for doing so. I can only see a tiny niche market for uncomfortably small netbooks. Let the old tiny netbook remain peacefully in its grave.
Microsoft killed the Netbook. Tablets and phablets came around after the netbook was already dead. I still have my eepc netbook, running Lubuntu. When I use it, people come up and are fascinated, and want to know where they can buy one. But they can't.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Or do you really think people are going to bother toting around netbooks instead of phones and tablets?
I do. I carry a phone on a pay-as-you-go plan without a data plan and pay per year what many pay per month. I also carry a now seven-year-old Dell netbook because it works fine for my hobby programming projects while I ride the city bus to and from my day job. On a netbook, I can open two 80-column windows side by side, viewing my source code in one and the output in the other. A tablet, by contrast, tends toward a window management policy of all maximized all the time because of its smartphone-derived GUI. On a netbook, I can run the occasional Windows application in Wine, such as the debugging version of the FCEUX emulator, with acceptable performance. A tablet, by contrast, is more likely to have an ARM CPU that's incompatible with the x86 instruction set for which Win32 applications are compiled, and I imagine the unsupported method of using Wine with QEMU would produce unacceptable performance due to emulation overhead.
Netbooks started out cheap because they ran (stripped down) Linux distros that could run on the minimal hardware. Well, Chromebooks do that today - with fewer compromises in performance (for what they can do). And you can load a full Linux distro on them, so the hackers that loved netbooks are also satisfied.
The problem with a Chromebook is that it's too eager to wipe itself once you put it into developer mode. Anybody who turns on your developer-mode Chromebook is prompted to press Space then Enter to erase everything and reenable OS verification.
11.6 inch isn't "small" to people who prefer 10.1 inch for ease of carrying.
Some of us take care of hundreds of sites where we may have to locally console into devices to work with them. Or we may have to attend conferences or meetings with the organizations that we work with. Or we may have to be on-call.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I would have thought that some sort of low-end android tablet or phone with a keyboard case of some kind would make this proposed product redundant.
Not unless it's an Android/x86 tablet or phone. One of the advantages of a GNU/Linux netbook used to be that one could run Wine for the occasional Windows app that doesn't demand performance more than what you'd get out of, say, a Pentium 4. (An Atom from the netbook era had instructions per clock roughly comparable to a P4.)
A tablet running a smartphone-derived operating system runs smartphone applications. A netbook ran desktop applications. If a desktop application is available for a particular task, but an application for a smartphone-derived operating system is not, it's quicker to run an existing desktop application to perform that task than to write a smartphone application from scratch and then perform the same task.
No laptop user would choose it unless they very literally can't afford anything better
The only "serious" (i.e. non-Atom) 10 inch laptops that I'm aware of are Panasonic's expensive "Let's Note" laptops sold only in the Japanese market. Prices start at $1,200, and I wouldn't be able to buy one with a warranty anyway because I live in the United States, not Japan.
Besides, aren't Chromebooks the current day netbooks?
Not as long as destruction of your Crouton installation is as easy as following the prompts to press Space Enter.
Aren't "Ultrabooks" the Netbooks we all really wanted? We have 12-13" laptops now that probably have less volume than the 9-12" Netbooks they replaced.
_nfotxn
And a netbook is a dece3nt productivity tool? wtf? both are serious compromises when it comes to productivity.
No they weren't. The cut down cheap version of XP that came with many netbooks was limited to 2GB and hence a lot of the motherboards were also limited. however as long as the motherboard supported more you could put in more.
What I want :
1. Integrated REAL keyboard - no virtual kbd, no separate bluetooth crap that I must manage its separate battery charge status, can STAND BY ITSELF and GUARANTEED TO STAY IN ONE PIECE on irregular,vibrating surface like bag on my lap on subway so no separate keyboard with kickstand or magnet connected like MS surface/current netbooks
2. Lightweight for mobile gaming - can be used continually with two hand grip(like nintendo DS) or one hand grip(like smartphone). In my experience the upper weight limit is somewhere around 400g~500g
3. NO castrated storage - cpuwise Atom is OK you can even use OLD generation low power Atom like Z530(2W)+yucky imagination GMA500 GPU to run dosbox/SNES emulator/2d games rather well. Current Atom(after bay-trail) with REAL INTEL GPU can even run lightweight 3d games well if you set the preferences low. All the slowness comes from its slooooow eMMC raw flash(no parallel tricks like SSD) storage especially it's write speed is painfully slow.
4. adequate memory - minimum 2GB
5. good battery capacity - minimum 10 hours for light use/3 hours for heavy(gaming) use.
6. OS freedom just like PC - install & use linux just like pc without problem. android? I'll install android myself if necessary.
7. NO castrated USB(like having only 1 micro usb that also used for charging - huge headache for charging&attaching external devices simultaneously)
8. REAL connector to external display device - NO MIRACAST CRAP
For now I have one that satisfy 1,2,7,8(now discontinued UMID mbook SE) I hope to find one that satisfy all my requirements(plus more)
I am fed up with the design of mobile devices (less than 1 Kg) useful only for social-bullsh!t.
I need a way to connect to my servers and network equipment by CLI on a reasonable screen.
Touch keyboard eat 50% of a landscape screen.
Bluetooth keyboard are nice, but need an extra charger.
Netbooks are great tools, but you need to find one: it's an endangered species.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
All of that software you listed runs great on a Surface Pro 4, aka "a tablet", aka "fondleslab."
Probably not what you're thinking of though since the price on that plus keyboard is $1,200+
Picked up a Samsung Chromebook 3 at Walmart for around 90$. Cheap. Super duper cheap.
It has a paltry 32gb internal storage, but I dont use it. Instead, I installed crouton, and set up a chroot on a big microSD card. By default, crouton wants to use a very old revision of ubuntu. (Trusty, I think...) It has no problems setting up a Xenial or newer one though. It just complains at you something terrible when you tell it to install anything other than trusty, and after that shuts the hell up and works as expected.
Regardless, this is an Intel based chromebook, so the chroot can drive WINE like a champ.
It is a 1.6ghz dual core Intel system with 2gb of RAM, with ZRAM enabled. Has wifi, bluetooth, HDMI out, and the like.
No physical HDD, so dropping isn't an issue. The CPU is actually a 2ghz chip that is downthrottled for heat dissipation reasons, so it has no fan inside. Internal battery lasts 8 hours in active use.
It weighs less than a pound.
It works just fine for me as a netbook. I can run some limited office productivity software on it (Office works in WINE if you know what you are doing-- and OpenOffice works native, due to linux) I have a choice of browser, I can multitask, and do local saving. Works great. Just a little inconvenient, because I have to start the chroot every boot. (there ARE ways to make it boot automatically when chrome starts, but meh.)
Really, if it werent for the chromebooks using some bizzarro ACPI based keyboard and sound hardware that normal Linux does not know how to handle, it would be the go-to hardware for linux chromebooks to turn them into inexpensive netbooks.
We don't need no netbook. We need small - the size of a smartphone - wired (no bluetooth bullshit) keyboard. Then you hook it to your smartphone and have all the benefits w/o any drawbacks. For bonus points, I'd take a very small usb-hub and add a mouse.
Even if speech to text were perfect, it is only a solution when you're in a room by yourself, so becomes less feasible once you leave your parents' basement.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
you can use any keyboard via the mini usb connector.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Have you actually tried it recently? Oh, of course not. I just used it to text one of my sisters because it's quicker than using the on-screen keyboard, and I'm having left-over home-made spareribs for breakfast before heading out into the -18 cold.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
You obviously haven't tried it. It works even with the talking heads on TV yakking away on the news. It's easier than using the on-screen keyboard and gets rid of some of those auto-correct errors. Bunch of luddites, it's not 2010 any more.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Spec wise it has an old Atom (overclocked to 2GHz), a 11.6" screen and a Nvidia ION, HDMI output, can decode H264 in hardware without problem, has 3GB of RAM, ethernet, wifi abgn, bluetooth, 3 USB, etc.
I run Mint 17.3 Xfce on it, it works well, I still use it to debug some code in car application written on AVR ATMEGA, it can compile a 32K project in a few seconds, transfer it via USBasp, serial console via a CP2102, etc. I am using it mainly for this as my other laptop is 17" and too big.
The bottleneck is the CPU so browsing some big sites like facebook or reddit+res it is slow. I also installed Win10 on a partition to try it, it works fine!
You can buy one for ~$70 on eBay. To replace it I would need a $300 chromebook and manage to install linux on it, but would miss some keys maybe?
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
"Surface Pro 4"
Until wifi dies. Or the Surface wont turn on. Or the touch screen wont work.
We issued Pro 4s to our sales staff. I'm not joking -- literally 10% were dead on arrival. About half of the rest experienced the above problems (mixed in with dead screens, dead USB ports and a few other things) within the first year. We're now 1 year out from issuing them and about 6 months out from no longer replacing a dead/broken one with a replacement Pro. There's maybe 10 left in my region (out of about 90).
I blame PART of that on sales staff. They can be brutal on hardware sometimes. I blame most of it on the hardware which can't hand real world use.
I still have an old ASUS netbook from waybackwhen(tm). I installed ubuntu on it and use it primarily as a remote terminal when I need to go in the field. I love the fact the thing can easily fit in my glove box. That sucker has taken some abuse and still is kicking.
The fact that you think the TV going is the problem says a lot about you, but nothing about the real problem: It's really annoying to have people talking when you're trying to work, and if everyone in the office (or on the train, or wherever) is talking to their computer then everyone is going to be distracted.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/71296/20150723/this-old-acer-aspire-one-can-handle-windows-10-video.htm
The niche isn't gone. I know a small company that used a couple asus netbooks on the sales floor to work with customers to take orders (wedding invitations). As those asus devices died they were replaced with HP Stream 11 devices which I would consider to be the modern day equivalent of what we used to call netbooks. Even with a larger screen they are lighter and have better battery life. they have limited local storage, but the customer orders are stored on a local server so no need for a lot of local storage.
The/a niche for these still exists.
Bang the enter key 5 times to activate the default buttons on dialogs, now say 'OK' five times. What is the ease of use ratio? Navigate to one field on a form that needs updating and update it with voice. Now do it with a mouse and keyboard.
It's better than an onscreen keyboard, barely.
If you can't type much faster and accurately than you can speak, you need to learn to type.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The original post conflates two things: netbooks and sub-netbooks (aka pocket PCs). Netbooks never completely went away, although the name went away after it went out of fashion. The first netbook wave had 9" screens, except for the original Eee PC 700 which had a 7" screen but was as big as a 9" system - the small screen was for cost reasons and it had huge bezels. Later they grew in size a bit as technology improved and it was possible to make them in 10-12" sizes that weren't heavy or expensive. The larger size allows for both more screen real estate, a keyboard that is closer to full size and easier to type on, and a better trackpad. Current examples include the HP Stream, the ASUS X205, the Acer Aspire 11.6, and the Dell Inspiron 11.
We also have Chromebooks now. The lower end ones either have hardware similar to the low end PCs mentioned above or use an ARM processor instead. (There are also fancier Chromebooks with Intel Core CPUs and 1080p displays that cost more.) They fill many of the needs that people used to use netbooks for. It's also possible to make them more like a full capability PC by installing Linux, either alongside Chrome OS or in place of it.
Sub-netbooks did go away for a while; tablets took over their niche. (I'm talking about devices that are a true 7" size or smaller and have full keyboards. Many of them are also designed to run full desktop software.) Devices that small don't allow normal touch typing; the technique is either hunt and peck or thumbboarding. The tiny keyboard doesn't have much advantage over a touchscreen keyboard for most users and eliminating the keyboard lowers the cost and weight, so sub-netbooks died as a mass market product.
The recent crowdfunded projects are using inexpensive contract manufacturing to make tiny PCs again. They have the same CPU and display that you'd find in a small Windows tablet (sometimes without the touchscreen) and add a tiny keyboard. They aren't likely to become mass market products again, but the crowdfunded products will satisfy the small minority that prefers that kind of system.
How many people have you seen using a fullsize keyboard with a tablet (which would require at least one adapter to lose or break) on a plane or train?
You haven't even attempted to address the point of the toy OSs on these devices.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You obviously haven't tried it. It works even with the talking heads on TV yakking away on the news. It's easier than using the on-screen keyboard and gets rid of some of those auto-correct errors. Bunch of luddites, it's not 2010 any more.
Except the real-time speech-to-text on the news involves trained operators in a sound-proof room wearing headphones repeating everything that the people in the studio are saying into an expensive commercial voice-recognition rig that has been trained to their voice.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Ever written any amount of text longer than a tweet on a touch keyboard? It's painful.
Eat the rich.
But they were quaint.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
What the HELL does navigation have to do with speech to text replacing typing your messages? Oh, right - absolutely sweet fuck all. Which is easier - to type on a phone screen or to dictate your message? Hint - speech to text is quicker and more accurate.
Quit moving goalposts.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Try using it to dictate on your phone. It works. No headphones and noise-cancelling microphones, and google trains it to your voice as you use it. And they have far more cpu to throw at any single sentence than that expensive commercial rig can pump out.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.