Netbooks: The Beginning of the End
By Harry McCracken | Saturday, November 26, 2011 at 11:43 am
Back in 2008 and 2009, I spent a lot of time defending netbooks. (At the time, PC makers were selling them by the boatload–but also kept saying they were lousy products which would surely go away soon.) Netbooks are still with us, and still have their place. But it looks like one big manufacturer–Samsung–might be giving up on them, at least if you define netbooks as laptops that have low-end processors and screens that are no bigger than 11″ or thereabouts.
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7 Comments For This Post
November 26th, 2011 at 1:41 pm
As long as netbooks beat ultrabooks in battery-life, storage space, expandability (more ports), and price, there will be market for netbooks. A low-end ultrabook costs more than double what the average netbook costs, and I doubt the average non-techie consumer would really notice or care about the different in processor performance.
November 26th, 2011 at 7:52 pm
For the most part Ultrabooks have the same assortment of ports as netbooks.
November 26th, 2011 at 4:06 pm
The original promise for netbooks seemed to be that the computers would become cheaper, that the flash storage would become faster and that netbooks would end up becoming great little computers that lived in the cloud, launched applications quickly, entered and left standby instantly and synced easily with our larger computers at home. Instead, they just became small Windows notebooks.
When the same $300 can get you a netbook or a Pentium-based notebook that's faster, has about the same battery life and has more memory and storage, there's really nothing compelling you to buy a netbook other than the small size.
I think that Jolicloud really missed the boat by not getting a finished product out sooner. Jolicloud would have been a great little product for netbooks that had a few GB of local storage and lived in the cloud, but there's little reason to install one on a netbook that has a 250GB hard drive. Now, the iPad owns what would have been the netbook market.
November 26th, 2011 at 7:51 pm
Samsung was never really big on netbooks, they have launched very few models. If Asus announced they would be discontinuing netbooks then fans of the mini laptops would need to really worry.
November 26th, 2011 at 8:24 pm
Samsung dropping out may help netbooks overall by making them more profitable for the smaller manufacturers.
November 27th, 2011 at 6:52 am
Netbooks turned out to be nothing more than a stop-gap between laptops and tablets.
February 21st, 2012 at 5:07 pm
Considering that everyone is regarding high-tech, promoted is not surprising in which organizations are racing in direction of combining latest technologies. Take, for example, the mini netbook computer and also …netbook