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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.
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
and after reading the specs, 2gb and 4gb... i rather break up a modern smart phone and put it in a old laptop casing than having that crap
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.
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.
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 still miss my first generation EEE PC which was stolen two years ago. It had a special battery that lasted forever and was perfect for writing novels outside. Now I'm using an Asus Transformer, I had to put special anti-reflective plastic over the display to be able to read anything, it still sucks in the sun and it runs Windows 8. :(
Anyway, the reply to your post: Netbooks are awesome, perfect for writing books outside, for example.
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.
specs?, piece of shit machines that were locked to having max 2 gb ram, who the fuck thought that was ever a good idea
Microsoft thought it was a good idea to limit netbooks.
The 1st netbooks ran Linux. People found out that they didn't need Windows. Just a browser mainly. Manufacturers found they could reduce a large % of the cost by not putting Windows on it.
MS had discontinued XP and netbooks couldn't run 7. So they brought XP back for netbooks. They created a spec it that limited the screen resolution, ram and cpu.
And that ultimately killed netbooks. It saved MS's Windows revenue for a number of years.
When the iPad and Android tablets came out, that trick wouldn't work anymore. Millions learned that they could do "internet" just fine without Windows. They could Google, Facebook, do google docs, listen to music, watch videos, take photos to put up on the web, chat, and surf the web.
Google Chromebooks are probably the closest we have to a Netbook now. For those of us that want to, Linux wll run on most of them too.
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...
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.
Uhhh my AMD netbook is rocking 8Gb of RAM and came with 4Gb and Win 7 X64, maybe you shouldn't have been buying those crap Intel Atom netbooks? At the time it was only $60 more to get the AMD one and when I'm not using it on house calls I can use it as an HTPC with full 1080P over HDMI.
The reason you saw so many of the crap Atoms is Intel was product dumping, its the same reason you see so many of those Intel Atom convertibles so cheap now. But Atom was shit then, its still shit now, if you are gonna get a netbook? Don't make it an Atom if you don't want it to be crippled and blow ass, heck the AMD netbook chips even support hardware VM and ECC memory if you needed it so no segmenting the market like Intel always does.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
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.
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."
I see your viewpoint, but some of us work in coffee shops and libraries to avoid the noise and distraction at home.
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.
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.
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.
Asus still makes them. Transformer. I've got 2 of them and love em.
Too bad it's a pain to install GNU/Linux on the Asus T100TA. Suspend is still broken, among other things.
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.
And a netbook is a dece3nt productivity tool? wtf? both are serious compromises when it comes to productivity.
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.
The return rate for Linux-based netbooks was significantly higher that Windows ones. I don't think that it can be said that people found that they didn't need Windows. Also, it was Vista that didn't work well on netbooks. They fixed this with the Windows 7 Starter Edition, which finallly replaced XP on netbooks.
Netbooks still exist in the form of... netbooks. The Lenovo Ideapad 100S or the HP Stream 11 spring to mind as examples of this format. The specs tend to be 11" screen, 2GB RAM & 32GB SSD & full Windows 10. I've had a few different varieties of this sort of thing, and they do a reasonable job even though I'm not a big fan of Windows 10.
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
It was the market that replaced Linux with Windows, but there was also some aspect of conspiracy. Microsoft couldn't charge the full license cost of Windows for a machine as cheap as a netbook without driving up the price significantly (and making the Linux versions a lot cheaper) so they offered Windows XP for netbooks, but with a bunch of caps on the maximum spec that it would support to avoid cannibalising the rest of the laptop market. This effectively capped the maximum specs for netbooks.
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