We might not have believed it 5 years ago, but “netbooks” are proving that there is a real market for tiny, affordable laptops. They are selling like hotcakes, but what does that mean for us in the future?
What netbooks lack power and features, they make up with much smaller form factors and very affordable prices. They usually come in at 7-10 inches, with Intel Atom processors and a variety of hard drive, SSD, and webcam options. Netbooks are selling well; they dominate Amazon’s top 20 bestsellers list, taking up 15 spots. New models are popping up weekly with almost all major PC manufacturers marketing their own ultraportable.
We have to keep in mind though that there are quite a few problems. Companies like Sony and Apple fear that a price war will force prices down and shrink already small profit margins. Also, as Farhad Manjoo of Slate says, they are ugly and can be pretty slow since they run operating systems designed for full-fledged computers. He calls for a sleek tablet that would be optimized for web and media consumption, pretty much a big iPod touch.
I don’t know if a tablet will be the sweetspot in the netbook world. There have been previous attempts at making a web tablet, but they haven’t really caught on. What I do know is that the laptop arena is going to experience big change in 2009 as new form factors and configurations emerge, among other things. We can expect some interesting new devices to be released in the coming months.
To be honest, all I like about netbooks is that they don’t have optical drives.
Optical drives just take up a lot of space inside the laptop, cause the weight to be unbalanced, aren’t something I use very often if ever, etc.
I’d rather have a smaller laptop or more battery life by using that space for a battery expansion. I don’t want to go to a screen smaller than 12-13″ or have to give up HD/CPU performance either.
HD/CPU performance comes at a price… a hefty price. What’s good about the netbook is that I can get basically the same performance on running anything other than video games, and not sped the 1200$ price tag or the weight that accompanies cheaper budget laptops.
Lighter weight, great performance, portable screen, severely low heat generation, and much higher battery life are everything that makes netbooks great. These are the very things I look for when shopping for a netbook over a laptop because oddly enough, these things are never mentioned when shopping for a laptop.
They never tell you how much heat generation the laptop produces. They rarely tell you how much battery life it has (Because it’s usually in the 1-2 hour range), and they put 0 emphasis on the weight of the product. These are things that you have to search for yourself through reviews, which you only regret in hindsight after paying 1500$ for the laptop.
The keyboard is the real reason why you get a netbook rather than a Sony PSP, iPod Touch or a Smartphone. It is a laptop with all the benefits.
The thing is with a good Linux distro or WinXP recent models are not that sluggish, and with the price of hardware getting down faster than applications get fat, they’re only going to gain popularity… While there will still be a market for people willing to spend $3,000 in a machine, I believe the price for an average machine is still going to go down.
The referenced Slate story and the authors’ spin both sound like Astroturfing for the iTablet. I long for the day when tech journalists decide to stop being Apples b*tch.