3. Netbooks: small and in charge.

It’s always been possible to make a small notebook PC without much in the way of fancy features and sell it at a low price. It’s just that no major manufacturer bothered to do it until Asus released its first Eee PC (drawing obvious inspiration from OLPC’s XO) in the fall of 2007. Now everybody from HP to Lenovo is in the game, and some people want a Mac netbook so badly they’re not waiting for Apple to introduce one. I spent most of the year thinking that netbooks were a fad; I’m still not completely convinced they’re not…but I’m flirting with buying one myself.