Netbooks projected to become EXTINCT by 2015 Proving yet again that fame and fortune are fleeting – even for computer hardware – the analysts at IHS are projecting that the netbook, the New Hotness just a few short years ago, will disappear completely by 2015. "Once a white-hot PC product that sold in the tens of millions of units annually," IHS writes in an email …
Form factor's a thing all around - most people toting around tablets are holding them like clipboards. The portrait angle definitely helps for that. You can't really stand up and hold a netbook and still work with it, it's still forcing you into desk mode even if you don't have a desk. Someone in the elevator this morning pulled a tablet right out of his jacket pocket and tapped away. That's not really convenient with a netbook.
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This is more a problem of the iThingy and other "finger only" toys and less one of the tablet in general. Penables work fine in portrait mode with the right software that can handle handwriting entry and post-entry(batch) handwriting recognition for longer texts. Say MS Journal or OneNote
Writing in a forum works nicely with Windows HWR as well
Send from my Win8 upgraded EP121
Bought my wife an Asus EE netbook thingy for £175 two years ago. Ok battery is not fantastic, but for her it does everything she needs it to do. Why would I want to spends hundreds if not a thousand more on an Ultrabook?
The consumer has wised up to this now, hence PC sales are down, and the true successor to the netbook is a tablet....
I spent that much on an 11.6" laptop last year. I's 64-bit windows 7 home premium with 2Gb RAM and an ad-supported version of office (now dual-booting ubuntu). It's far more useful than a tablet for many things, but the tablet has the benefit of "lean back" usage (and better speakers). It also lets me play media which the providers have deemed not to allow on "mobile" devices (such as my 10.1" tablet docked in its keyboard).
I don't know if this counts as a netbook though. It's cheap and light but it's also quite powerful and larger than the original netbooks. I think in reality the notebook didn't die, it just got bigger and better (they were small to be cheap, not portable). I'm more than happy having this and a 7" tablet (total cost: £385).
Actually you CAN use PS on a tablet. What you can not do is use it on a finger only toy. But WACOM equiped tablet pc work just fine.
As for Office - depends. If I want to type lengthy text I pop up the stand and switch on a BT mice/keyboard turning the tablet in a notebook (1). If I want to review/correct text, presentations etc. or draw the basics of a PowerPoint I use the stylus. MS Office is penable and has been so for a long time. It even supports some special modes for adding comments/notes.
(1) Or put the convertible in a dock, have not turned it to notebook mode in a year
My contribution to this article is that whilst I agree that netbooks have had their day, small form factor laptops have not...
Im writing this reply from my beloved Dual Core HP Pavilion DM1 with a 9hr battery life, 11.6"inch screen and 730p resolution (1366x768)... I frequently use it to stream 1080p movies (XBMC installed) to my spare room LED tv...
Again, netbooks are on their way out yes, but not because of their size, because of their low resolution and overall underpowered graphics and processors
At least netbooks had their day in the sun. Ultrabooks costing over a grand with crappy 1366x768 resolution were DOA. I personal moved to tablets after pissing away close to $400 on a POS Samsung NC10 that failed a few weeks after the short warranty expired due to a crappy video cable internal design flaw (hinges pinching cable). Many people didn't buy a second netbook after seeing how crappily built to fail the first generation was.
"At least netbooks had their day in the sun. Ultrabooks costing over a grand with crappy 1366x768 resolution were DOA. I personal moved to tablets after pissing away close to $400 on a POS Samsung NC10 that failed a few weeks after the short warranty expired due to a crappy video cable internal design flaw (hinges pinching cable). Many people didn't buy a second netbook after seeing how crappily built to fail the first generation was."
My first netbook (acer aspire one) came with a ghastly, half arsed linux os on it that completely fucked up about 30 seconds after hitting the `update os` button and an ssd with a writespeed so slow it was pretty much useless. I ended up putting meego on it, which turned it into a really useful, fast little web browsing machine for slinging in my backpack. It booted in seconds and the really well thought out ui ran amazingly fast. Pity they abandoned meego really, it was really good on the netbook form factor, much better than chrome os.
That little Acer has survived many knocks, drops and misshaps like a trooper and apart from the battery, it still functions like new. The screen has a really nice quality to it as well, much better than the NC10 in my opinion.
So in my case it was well worth the £170 I paid for it almost half a decade ago. I wouldnt use it for anything other than web browsing though, the ssd really is painfully slow writing anything, resulting in a very juddery full windows/linux experience.
>Also because it was practically impossible to get hold of a
> netbook with built in 3G, Bluetooth etc. etc.
My Dell mini-10 has both. Shame that Dell never took the product line forward. Cost me £189 with ubuntu, and the only thing wrong with it is the hideous x600 vertical resolution - which they kept a deadly secret when they sold it.
My Dell 1012 has the 1366x786 hi-def screen with hardware video acceleration, Bluetooth etc. It cost me £214 brand new from the Dell Outlet. I use it all the time, and I cannot see anything better coming along for the price.
The problem was Microsoft and Intel shortsightedly slugging the ram and cpu specs to prevent colateral commercial damage to more expensive products.
Yes you can get away without 3g, but you're forgetting that when netbooks first came out most phones weren't smartphones, many of the smartphones that were available had tethering disabled and were on limited data plans (compared to pure mobile broadband) and in general had appalling battery life. The 3 Mifi is an improvement, but even this only manages a few hours when used in earnest.
But this misses the point, netbooks were targeted as being standalone ultra-portable and "use anywhere" devices, however what vendors delivered to the channel fell short both of this ideal and what they made available to reviewers. For example whilst Acer had a product code for an Aspire One with UK keyboard and built-in 3g and bluetooth, and made this variant available to reviewers, I was unable to buy or order one. However, I was able to purchase a Czech 3g version, which after a keyboard swap worked without problem with a Three UK SIM - being a member of the EU does sometimes have advantages....
I have argued that way for some time. Lately I changed my mind. Having 3G (or LTE) on board will allow me to get rid of the smart phone and for most situations even the mobile. No more "instant contact", no more "break my concentration" bells(1). Instead if one wants to contact me he writes an eMail and I respond when I have the time. Mobile could go back to "emergency phone in the middle of nowhere" that can only do calls but lasts a week and costs 50€
(1) If I switch it off / silent - I could as well leave it at home
While my EEE 1215B doesn't get the battery life yours does (5 hours new, 4 hours after 3 years) it too is 11.6 and has an AMD APU that does 1080P over HDMi and I have NO problem using this as a day to day laptop, I've watched movies, played games, heck edited audio multitracks on the thing and its a great little portable. i tried one of those Atom 10 inchers and even with such a small screen it was just painful to use, everything just chugged.
I think we'll see a comeback of the 12 inchers once the ultrabooks have bombed, i think many of the OEMs are afraid of competing with their ultrabooks but I just don't see many people paying a grand for a mini, I just don't.
Just stick 8gb of fast Ram in there and a decent SSD and it will beat almost any laptop available under £700 quid for an outlay of about £400, as well as being actually portable.
The onboard Nvidia chipset, although not the fastest thing in the world, really beats any of the intel equivalents (or indeed the Ion platform from NVidia) for games.
Have an old Asus Eee PC with flash drive, ended up disused due to Ubuntu doing some weird things with partitions after several installs and me not wanting to fuss with it. I should probably do something with the thing, it's nice and sturdy and still a good machine for writing on airplanes with. I'll take this article as a reminder to give the install another go.
I had a lot of hope for the netbook market but the best models were stripped-down travel companions that weren't really focused on bells and whistles. Manufacturers seemed to be chasing the higher margins with larger screens and higher functionality that ate up battery, which sort of defeated the point. Also the weird custom flavors of Linux that came installed were a bit of a turnoff. When you make someone have to install a different OS right after purchase, you turn your product into a niche hobbyist market.
@Ross K.
I never owned one, but I was never under the impression that they were supposed to be hardware superior. Were you under this impression?
I agree with whoever believes they have their place and won't go away completely. Shit, they still have a keyboard of some type, which is more than I can say for a lot of recent contraptions.
BTW, are they really going away? Didn't Microsoft just release one under the buzz word "tablet"? I think it came with a flimsy detachable rubber keyboard, or maybe you had to buy it (I really don't know or care).
I never owned one, but I was never under the impression that they were supposed to be hardware superior. Were you under this impression?
Hardware superior to what? Most of them were rocking a 1.6GHz Intel Atom and 1Gb RAM shared with the Intel GMA graphics driving a 1024x600 screen resolution?
Like I said, they're good for surfing the net. I dunno how that that guy who posted after you claimed to run Photoshop on one.
There were tablets before Microsoft's shitty Surface RT. The iPad? The Nexus 7? Countless Android devices? And what's your point about a keyboard? Grandma can check out Facebook or Hotmail just fine using an onscreen keyboard...
On a recent trip, I had both and found the netbook more useful than the tablet. For one thing, only the tablet could handle the external hard drives (which were TrueCrypted, so the tablet couldn't read them). Even when it came to videos, it was just easier to handle. It was unbeatable for web browsing. Plus it had a switchable battery, so I kitted it with a triple-capacity battery, so it had plenty of legs even in places where outlets were few and far between.
Oh, it had one key advantage over a full-fat laptop. You didn't have to take it out at the security checkpoints.
There is an Edit button. And a Preview button ;-)
Edit: it might only be for Silver and Gold users. Back on topic-ish, I'm on a tablet at the moment so I couldn't hover over your badge to see if was gold or bronze. I had to long-press the image, open in a new tab and hope the url indicated the colour :-(
Get a better tablet :)
Dell Latitude 10 for example can replace both your tablet and your netbook (Has a replaceable battery as well). The Fujitsu Q552 should work as well. Ativ500 might work (shorter legs, non-replaceable battery)
TPT2 has a fixed battery so this might be a problem, has some limits to the USB as well.
The specs you describe are far more than necessary to run Photoshop 7. It worked well enough for me plus it loaded so slowly that I'm probably the only person on the planet that has memorized the names in the start up credits & got to read what all those things initializing actually were.
"Grandma can check out Facebook or Hotmail just fine using an onscreen keyboard..."
Actually that is a problem for many older users. My mother has both an iPad and one of the Samsung Android phones and she has to carry around a stylus to use the touch screens because her fingers don't register well. One of her friends got a new Nokia with the super sensitive screen and it works just fine for her and my mother but I tried it and have the problem where I constantly wind up launching a bing search because when I move my thumb to touch a tile the base of my thumb comes close enough to trigger a 'touch' on the bottom right corner.
Perhaps phone and/or tablet makers could add a setting to make the screen more or less sensitive, preferably with a physical button combination, [home or power]+[vol-up/down] for instance, since an on screen slider would be useless to someone who may not register well on the base setting or doesn't want to take the gloves off. I suppose that this isn't a trivial thing else someone would have done it by now.
I take it you never tried any of the AMD ones? Because with those having an APU (and not starved for RAM like an Atom) they were and are quite nice. I have an E-Series and my dad's GF has a C-Series and both hers and mine just run like champs, flash, H.264, they are more like a little laptop than those pre-crippled Atoms. Heck go look at the $299-$399 USD laptops at any Best Buy, its the same APUs they were using in the netbooks just put in a bigger case.
And as far as the guy running PS...I ran Audacity and would do basic editing of the multitracks my band made...does that count? I wasn't running a bunch of effects but if something needed a little compression or verb to see how it would sound I could do that no prob.
Surface/Pro is actually a high end notebook (core i5/4GB/1920x1080 graphics etc) not a netbook. Those where/are Atoms,
Now comparing one of the better Netbooks (Lenovo S10-3) with a current tablet pc (Ativ 500 or even Lenovo TPT2 without 3G) the new boxes cost more but offer more as well. S10-3 with 2GB/2500GB HDD and Win7 starter came in at around 400€ (including memory upgrade to 2GB) with a crappy 1024x600 screen and around 6h on battery. An Ativ 500 with Win8 (equivalent to 7 Home/Premium) and a SSD as well as a better screen comes in at 600€, the TPT2 at 700€ and better endurance (and a slightly faster Atom)
That should be Surface/Pro is actually a crap notebook.
Can't use it on your lap or any non-solid surface. Can't change the angle on a desk, and even the very expensive keyboard is not very good.
For less money you can get a nice notebook.
I paid $239 for my Samsung NC10 (came with a keyboard too) why would you want to compare that to something that costs about 4 times as much?
Currently writing this on the even bigger /heavier EP121 and this works nice on a sofa. That is what the Wacom pen is for.But you are a troll anywhay co mparing an Atom netbook with a core-i based tablet.And a lousy netbook to boot lacking even bluetooth
I don't agree. I wrote the entire project document for my company's first seven figure deal on my trusty Acer XP Netbook. It couldn't run AutoCAD but it did perfectly well in crafting the 1,300 page document & all the stuff that went into it. I also built the project website using old school Macromedia products and Photoshop.
Yes it would have been nice to have something bigger & better but the little guy got the job done & that's all you can ask of your tools.
"... all you can ask of your tools."
That about sums it up. Unfortunately most folks want toys not tools so netbooks were finished when they didn't play the latest whatever perfectly. Add to that nobody ever wanted to build and promote an "ecosystem" of apps designed around the limited capabilities. I do find it funny that Windows 8 has gone with the Metro Modern UI that reminds me of the original EeePC UI only instead of tabs it wipes to the side.
People are getting wise to the fact that ultra-books are not worth the extra $ compared to cheaper netbooks as covered in the recent Reg article 'Netbooks were a GOOD thing and we threw them under a bus'...
Netbooks are very useful for throwing in a backpack and taken along on a journey or when travelling... Also a cheap netbook connected to the TV via HDMI/VGA with a wireless keyboard is far superior to a Smart TV IMHO!
If there are no netbooks by 2015, People will just hold off, sit on the sidelines and buy nothing...Or they'll go the smartphone or tablet route... I think we should be talking about the death of Ultrabooks... Especially the overpriced Win-8 flavour! No doubt though the death of netbooks will hurt consumers overall...
...except, this is a talk about the death of Netbooks.
Y'know, because facts (i.e. Sales data) outway misty-eyed opinions.
People will not engage in mass no-purchase (an idea so patently absurd it drove me out of 'read-only' apathy!)
Why? gosh, I guess that's because they are already buying alternatives!
Rattling on about how good a Netbook is to use makes no odds against reality and that reality is that Netbooks filled a niche which has since been appropriated by other devices - and high-end Ultrabook ain't one of 'em
..oh yes, and I posted in the '...under a bus" article as well and was downvoted - a wonderful illustration of desire overruling data. One day the tech community will get the fact that the consumer buys what they want and us banging drums about 'gone' geeky element makes no difference - mainly because there are so very few IT Techs as % of the pop....
(and by the way, I typed this the same way I type all my comments on El Reg these last 2 years, on an iPad. I admit tho' I can't hack Debian onto it same way as I did my Ps2)
I think you missed the point. If what people want is a netbook but the only option in anything approaching that form factor costs 5 times what they wanted to spend then they won't send...or they might buy a tablet or phone. This is a prediction, not a call to arms. But I expect most people would be buying a notebook to supplement a tablet or phone, considering the number of those already out there.
People will not engage in mass no-purchase ....
Why? gosh, I guess that's because they are already buying alternatives!
People will buy a piece of kit if they feel a need for a piece of kit. If my 4-year-old netbook broke today (and couldn't be fixed) I would try to get a replacement ... but I don't have much hope that I'd find anything on the market today that I'd consider worth spending money on: The screens are too low-resolution and it's hard to find one with 3g fitted.
If I ever do find a more modern netbook with a decent screen and connectivity I'll probably go out and buy it as an upgrade even though my current one may still work. Until then I'll engage in (solitary) no-purchase ... but I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way about the current market.
The problem seems to me to be that the manufacturers want us to buy expensive ultrabooks but we spitefully choose to buy cheap low-margin netbooks instead. Their response is to make netbooks less and less desirable in the hope that that will drive us to buy ultrabooks, but we just sit on the fence and say "Meh!"
Make me a netbook using the screen of the Nexus 10 tablet, put 500GB of inexpensive hard drive it in rather than an SSD (though SSDs are now half-way to being affordable), and put Linux on it and I'll bit your hand off. Until then I'll carry on using my old £300 Acer.
And here is a WHOOSH for you. What the guy was saying is that many people that WOULD have bought netbooks are now either buying laptops or something like a tablet NOT because that was their first choice, but that MSFT and Intel priced the systems right out of existence. Just look at the EEE, started out less than $250, the last units were selling a hair under $500! That is DOUBLE okay? That would be like saying "nobody wants econo cars" when you make every econo car more expensive than a Mercedes!
I know that I ended up having to get a refurb Aspire One for my dad's GF because we simply couldn't find any new netbooks, and several friends bought 15 inchers not because they wanted 15 inches, but because the only 12 inchers were over $1000 and the 15 was $375 this isn't about the public not wanting them, its about Intel and MSFT not wanting them, MSFT because they think that they can slap a paintjob on a Pinto and sell it for Porsche money and Intel because they have piles of i5s and i7s they want to push for sweeter margins.
"Netbooks are very useful for throwing in a backpack and taken along on a journey or when travelling..."
^^^ This.
I spent a little while shopping around trying to find a little netbook precisely for this purpose. Ended up buying one second hand for just over £100, upgraded the RAM to 2GB and Win Starter -> Win Home, installed my usual stuff on it and it's a great little machine for doing small bits of coding or writing whilst out and about on the fly (currently learning Python at the moment). The screen's a bit small, but using FF in full-screen mode helps.
The other day I set it up with Apache server and used VLC to stream the webcam so I could watch the bird table in the garden from my office.
Plus I can play Baldur's Gate on it.
Personally I love netbooks to bits, and will probably buy a couple more before they become extinct. I'll certainly be sorry if they disappear.
My phone and tablet can connect to a TV through a small adapter (about the size of a large camera battery). I can use a bluetooth (or wired) keyboard and mouse.
Take the Asus Transformer series or the Fonepad.
Translation: the netbooks haven't died. They've transformed into other platforms.
So Chipzilla made a big song and dance about how Atom would be their knight in shining silicone. With netbooks fading and nettops never really gaining much momentum, where next for the Atom other than an occasional NAS box or the odd phone? They don't seem to be taking the fight to ARM in the mobile space, and from what I read, Windows 8 is a bit of a lame duck. Will the high-end x64 stuff keep them afloat until they do think of something new?
Intel is a victim of its own success in many ways. You would be hard pressed to design an instruction set harder to put in a phone than the x86(and its many derivatives). If Intel who has more money than God and is always a generation ahead of everyone else in fab technology can't get x86 competitive with ARM in the mobile space then it may well not be possible.
Intel screwed up with the Atom in recent years, that's the reality. Bay Trail due second half of the year goes a long way in catching up with x64, more DRAM, quad core and much improved graphics. But its a product that should have been available in 2012 and that's the underlying reason for many of the current issues discussed here including the death of the netbook and poor PC sales. When Intel get to realize its better to keep their fabs busy on lower margin parts is something we'll discover in time, in the x86 v ARM competition theres little room for $100+ parts.
Its a matter of semantics whether the new detachable/convertible formats are the new netbooks. IMO of current hardware the Surface devices give the best idea of what is to come, whether as Windows or Linux derived machines. Apart from screen aspect ratio. Seems so obvious to me that 16:10 is all it takes to make portrait mode useable - simply incredible how these dreaded 16:9 device keep being wheeled out.
Actually Atom is alive and well in the Win8 penables and those sell quite decently. And as others stated the next gen is basically out, Baytrail tablets will be in store late Q3/early Q4 this year. One of the reasons (together with Haswell) many are NOT buying right now, i.e a TPT2/Baytrail is basically announced, a Vaio Duo11/Haswell and T903 are "solid rumors"
There are no Windows tablets selling decently. People don't buy Windows tablets. This whole "Intel's future Atom wonderchip" business has long since come to the same trite meme as the Year of The Linux Desktop. If they ever ship an amazing mobile chip it will be as shocking as DNF finally coming available.
Of course with their top-end fabs 40% idle, maybe they've got a shot at accelerating the process progress.
Strange. All the big PC manufacturers have new Windows tablets out. Completely new units in many cases not re-cycled tech/chassis etc. And at least DELL and Lenovo have delivery times for their Latitude and TPT2 units currently. And the turnover rate for Ativ500 at the big chains here is high enough that 1/3 of the shops have a "pickup in 2-3 days" instead of "available" listing currently. Given their logistics again a sign the unit sells well.
Wasn't there just another article a couple days ago about how Win8 is killing PC sales and how everyone's sales are in the crapper?
Vendors pushing stuff and vendors selling stuff are two entirely different things.
Of course the industry doesn't want netbooks or nettops. Why let you buy suitable kit for $300 when they can sell you something for $600 or $1200?
My Toshiba NB550D (about £215 when I bought it) is a real trooper. I upgraded it to 4GB of RAM, give it a 64GB SSD drive upgraded to Win7x64 and it is now an excellent field laptop. I take it to all the dusty LAN rooms where there is no room to move and this fits the bill. The Battery lasts over 10 hours. The only major downside is the screen vertical pixels of 600, however It does do HDMI@1080p and is a very convenient tool.
I concur, a great little netbook. And you can replace the screen with a 1366x768 one- look here in Tom's hardware - http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/88590-35-trying-upgrade-toshiba-nb550d-screen-wsvga-wxga .
I am the jbbandos there, and my next upgrade will probably be changing the 4GB I put in to 8GB RAM. I've also changed the wifi for an Intel 6300-N.
Why can't the manufacturers give us something like that? A AMD APU (Intel GMA500 fiasco meant I won't ever buy an Intel chipset netbook/laptop), 1366x768 at least, 4-8GB RAM, a decent HD or a SSD, 802.11n dual band, HDMI out, all in 10" form factor, makes a perfect Linux netbook, but there are painfully few out there. And if you want 3G connectivity, you're out of luck.
I would love to get my hands on a decent laptop with some normal specs
play hdmi content on a television
have a screen with minimum 800 pixels height
around 11 inch
preferably mat display
works with linux
I have now a vaio vpcx11alj on loan from a friend and it would be perfect except that the screen backlight flickers under linux. Running the thing under the installed windows is perfect if you want to do some meditation while you wait for your webpage / program to open.
Is a EEE 1215B or 1225B, B stands for Brazos APU and from what I hear they have been supported for at least a couple of years now in the major distros. The size is 11.6, 1376x768 with HDMI that can do 1080P under Win 7, not sure about Linux, and gets around 5 on the battery new if you are on Win 7, I was able to get about another hour in Expressgate which is the Linux ChromeOS style OS that comes baked into the netbook. I hear there is a way to add your own apps to EG but I never tried it, it had a browser and media player and that was all I needed at the time.
Nobody around here got the memo. The stores couldn't keep'em in stock over the christmas season.
Of course, these are running unsanctioned Android ICS, so fly under the radar.
Hell, I bought one, and guess what? Using it for this post.
A word to MS, ICS does just fine with a wireless mouse and keyboard, no touch screen needed, and it interfaces with my TV via HGMI perfectly!
unsanctioned Android Tablets are annoying to hell apart from some tending to have crappy touch screens, they also lack google play store as well so mostly makes the device not very useful as bunch of my customers found out, one got an official Android Tablet device {after they smashed the screen}, 7" samsung tab i think and it was completely useable and she agreed with me the other tablet was junk (it was an copy of an official tablet they even gave it the same name)
the artifical limitations intel imposed on the netbooks that killed them off. 1024x600 is a bastard resolution that just doesn't work well, even for web browsing.
And limiting the Netbook flavour of Atom to 32 bit was plain evil, as it prevented a complete switch to 64 bit, even for the rest of the world.
Who would have needed a 32 bit Win7, if not for the Atoms?
A lot of windows nowadays are deeper than 600 pixels. Not fun having to navigate around a 700 pixel deep one when the top and bottom have disappeared.
If a customer comes to me with a broken Netbook I now refuse to fix them. When you can buy a new laptop with 4 times the performance for £260 its really not worth it.
The PC market as a whole is contracting a lot more quickly than Apple's computer sales — per that recent IDC report, worldwide computer shipments are down 14%, Apple's are down only 7.5%. Obviously you should frame that with the fact that Lenovo has managed to buck the trend entirely with 0% year-on-year difference but it seems to me that you could argue both that Apple is failing (sales down) or that it is succeeding (it's significantly outperforming the market average).
I had thought, after seeing the average netbook and other, smaller form laptops, that the 11" Air would be too small, until I saw one and played with it and spoke to others who have bought one. It's rather impressive and now I may have to reconsider my hard and fast decision to buy at least a 14". That smaller size seems to be remarkably readable, powerful and useful and, of course, wonderfully portable.
So, a tablet has a screen comparable in size to early netbooks, but where's the keyboard?
The first netbook I bought is still running, and still a useful machine.
Tablets do some things better, but need extras to do some of the most basic jobs computers are used for.
A netbook was a good choice for the schools market, something that a child could carry around and use, but I have heard a few stories about Linux-hostility from teachers. The ultra-cheap computers don't seem to be enough, and are tablets going to be any use?
They'll call them something else, and they will have more power, but that cost-niche for portable keyboarded computing isn't going to go away. Looking at how Ubuntu has changed, we seem to have thrown away a few good ideas that came from the netbook boom.
The keyboard (and mouse) are In the carry bag :)
Been doing that for quite some time, using a BT keyboard/mouse (MS 6000) combo when I type longer text on my privat tablet pc. Actually recomended against buying the Ativ500 with dock(1) a few times since it offers no benefits (dock is keyboard/standup only). Tablet pc + BT => More choices
(1) Exception: When you need/want 3G, currently you can not get the 3G/non dock variant
The reason netbooks are losing out is because of Microsoft. When first introduced with Linux on board they were fine since they didn't have to be dragged down by crapware anti virus or indeed the monolithic piece of junk that is windows. Of course msft put a stop to that because of the underlying PC architecture. In turn, that killed the business case for the hardware makers.
So pleased am I with my Packard bell dot s3 netbook with its 7.5 hr battery, that sensing this very netbook demise, i bought a spare one.
It does everything I need running Linux Mint!
Strange that Lenovo (one of the more sucessful PC makers) produced new netbooks well after the "Linux" hype had died down. The last units where even developed after XP was no longer sold and used Win7 as an OS.
As for monolithic - read Professor Tanenbaums comments on Linux, read on the design of the NT Kernel (Hybrid) and hide in shame.
I bought my MSI Wind U100 from a car boot sale for £95. Stuck Ubuntu and an extra 1GB RAM in it and now I use it almost exclusively for everything.
The only thing I find it difficult to live without is multi-touch on the trackpad - I have a unique hatred for Unity's scroll bars.
Otherwise it does everything I need a computer to do.
I don't watch films on it but I wouldn't watch them on a 15" laptop or a tablet either.
Average 13 inch laptops these days re much thinner and lighter than they used to be too. I suspect that portability has cannibalised a lot of the potential netbook market share too. The difference of a couple of mm between a poser toy ultrabook and most mainstream laptops is often minimal now.
Having said that, my old netbook is still going strong and goes on holiday with me every time.
Agreed - I picked up an HP Elitebook 2540p from Amazon for approx 400 quid and whacked it up to 6GB RAM for peanuts. I mainly need browsers and terminals and with Xubuntu installed the responsiveness is pretty much instant. On top of that it will run Netbeans (which is Java based) when I need it.
My Dell Mini 9 is great (again with Xubuntu) and I let lit-lun use it - but she prefers the OH's (13 inch) Mac now.
I think the problem is that 13 inch seems to be the lowest limit for a machine which you can work on all day. Generally, at home and in the office I plug in a 24 inch monitor and a keyboard and via the Displayport connection the screen looks great. I would say that the set up is as good as any current PC. But when I've needed to I've been able to work all day on the 13 inch Elitebook on its own - I'm not sure I'd want to work on the Mini 9 all day without it being plugged into an external monitor.
we will have something with an HD touch screen, very decent graphics and multi core arm processor with 10 hour battery life, add on keyboard so it looks exactly like a netbook, with a 'new fancy marketing name' and a price tag 30% more due to Windows 9 sitting on shelves in shops while similar Android devices fly off the shelves while IHS or their ilk tell us the 'new fancy marketing name' devices are on their way out as a large customer of their has asked for a market 'survey' that says so.
Intel battery life will be 10 hours or so in two years, ARM v x86 wars will have new battlegrounds. Whether Microsoft remain so stubborn on licensing costs that their market slips away - perhaps they will be as stupid as you imagine. But maybe not. Who knows? I don't. You don't either.
Intel battery life for Atom IS 10h right now for the better units. And with more performance than poor ARM can deliver in it's newest version (A15). And the next gen Atom is around the corner.
You can even get 10h with core-i but that will be heavier than an iThingy by a factor of 2 (Vaio Duo11+Sheet) or 3 (T902 with second battery). But the power! The power! T902 can emulate an ARM device at full speed and still has power to spare (Full power core-i)
Between myself and colleagues at other universities in IT, and students we work with, I saw dozens of different models the first few years. The Linux experience on early Netbooks (wifi drivers, etc) wasn't always a smooth one. One or two people around you with problems would suddenly make WIndows XP Home sound great on a cheap notebook.
I'd actually argue that Netbooks would have failed earlier if Windows hadn't shown up on them. Your average consumer wanted a cheap computer at that time, and Netbooks did serve the function of bringing laptop prices down for a lot of people. Personally, I'd rather have a Thinkpad X230 with a 9-cell battery on a long trip, and I know a lot of people like the 11" Macbook Air, because a computer should be capable. People will put up with tablets not doing some things a computer does because to them it's not a computer. If it looks like a notebook they want it to be powerful enough to do what they need, and they want it to run their favorite software.
I still use an Asus EEE netbook every day as a casual web browser while watching TV, as although I have an iPad and Android phone many websites and website features just don't work on these. When I first got the iPad I had thought it would stop the netbook been used much. But as the frustration increased with the touch interface and sites not designed for tablets browsers every few nights I found I had to use the netbook again. It has just become easier to always use the netbook in the first site rather than go through a frustrating tablet experience.
There are so many tablet / keyboard combo devices appearing, but I haven''t looked to see how many support a cursor / mouse as I believe it is often the mouse over events and things that stop sites working on tablets.
Well, I still like my Windows 7 netbook. I doubled the memory to 2GB for a few quid which really helped. It's only up to doing a single task at a time, but that's how most people use tablets. The netbook's got great battery life, a good keyboard, very portable, and like me it's desperately unfashionable.
I did expect to replace it with a Microsoft Surface, but not until they become cheaper.
The problem with netbooks is that they have fallen out of the mass market, so the manufacturers have stopped updating them. There is no reason now why they shouldn't come with 4G of memory, and 500G hard drives. But the tablets have taken such a significant part of the market, that it's not worth the cost of updating.
For me, it's a shame. Netbooks are fantastic travel companions: light, small, robust and with excellent battery life. And, originally, there were cheap so if you trashed one, you could replace it without a wince; sadly this last part is not so true any more.
Tablets? Nice toys, really, but how can you do any significant work on something without a keyboard?
Actually there is a reason a netbook won't come with 4GB - the Atom CPU can not handle that currently (Baytrail will change that). Change the CPU and you have a small notebook like the Thinkpad Edge E135 (1)
As for tablet pc and keyboards - there is this think called Bluetooth...
(1) Message to the Eadonverse:
The TP Edge 135 is actually available without Windows on Amazon!
They are a super form factor. But when you start to price them at £250-300 you are just taking the piss. Price them at £100-150, and make sure you can use a free OS such as Linux rather than having yet again to pay a Microsoft tax and I would suggest you had a winning product.
OK, the ones shipped with Linux were sent back, but they were still too expensive. A cheap netbook would be snapped up by techies, especially as a larger alternative to a smart phone. The absence of a keyboard is a serious restriction to smart phones, and any touch screen device will gobble up more power than it should just to keep monitoring the screen for touches.
Just a note that not EVERYONE on the planet is watching videos and being net-social 24 hours a day. Some of us work for a living, and a small portion of those do so in the field where machines capable of supporting RS232 connections, wired Ethernet, telnet, tftp servers, and a real keyboard and such get far more use than HDMI video connections and WiFI. Watching your $1K plus lappy drift slow-mo to a tragic demise at the base of an antenna tower smarts a lot more than a $200 or less second-hand netbook (I keep my local Pawn Shop on the lookout..) becoming one with the planet, and I'm a lot less inclined to take a risky grab to save it - and possibly follow it down for a close-up view of the destruction just before self-oblivion. Lightweight, rugged, versatile, and cheap works just fine, and even the cheapest and wimpiest netbook can keep up with my typing speed without much trouble.
Intel wanted to cripple the feature set, OEMs wanted to put fat Windows on them and that drives up the cost. ARM, however, lets the maker make what the maker wants to make. Some makers want to make cheap Chromebooks and some really fancy premium ones with ultra hi-def screens.
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When netbooks first came out, they generally had a crippled linux distro (ie no package repository)... But they were cheap, and did what most people wanted...
Once MS got into netbooks, they stopped being small consumer devices and started being "small, slow laptops"... And if they increased the specs to be less slow, so too increased the price making them "small, expensive laptops".
So now you have tablets, small, cheap and not running windows (and the very few that are don't sell well and/or aren't cheap). Netbook OEMs made the mistake of thinking people wouldn't buy netbooks without windows, when in reality windows is a millstone around their neck.
Aren't Windows 8 tablets and convertibles just an evolution of the netbook, rather than the category dying? Chromebooks too, in fact (since the original Eee used Linux). Netbooks caught on because they were small and cheap and good enough for basic computing, that hasn't changed, that's still what most consumers want and that's why tablets et al are probably going to outsell more traditional desktop/large laptop form factors within the decade I'd imagine.
Ultrabooks and Notebooks and most other overpriced variations of laptops are becoming pointless.
I have a Nexus7 tablet. That does most of what I want to do. I have a cheap buetooth keyboard that clips to it and that puts paid to anything I would want to do with a portable device bigger than my phone.
If I decide to write a book or more bad poetry, I have a desktop PC. That also deals with games. (That last item has been endangered by consoles for a long time though.)
I have no need for an ultrabook - what can it do that I want? There are some markets that might want netbooks - reps and travelling salesmen for example. People working in offices don't. Desktop PCs are better, faster, cheaper and less likely to give you RSI & eyestrain. Suit wearers and meeting goers seem to want iPads although there are better alternatives to them too.
What the article says, basically, is that if you use a conveniently narrow definition of "netbook" you can prove that nobody's buying them any more. Just as nobody buys desktops any more, and have all moved on to workstations. As long as you define "desktop" as "Pentium II at best" ...
The CompuSystem is fragile. We have already lost many species of Computer Based Lifeforms (CBLs), others are represented by a few specimens barely hanging on in captivity...
Not only have Human Articulated Malwares (HAMs) threatened the CompuSystem, now we have the 1% Elites playing Diety with CBL entities. They have no right to do this, a Universal Declaration of Digital Rights to Life needs to be proclaimed, our silicon based brethren and sisteren deserve protection!!
I urge you all to speak up now, protest, contact lawmakers, whatever... This slaughter must stop!!
I'm not the type to blame "The big bad M$" but in this case its true, when they came out the OEMs got XP Home for $15 a pop, then Win 7 Starter cost $35 and was so crippled that many netbook OEMs went and spent $50 on Win 7 HP, then by Win 8 the price had gone up to $60 according to rumor which when combined with the flood raising HDD costs just left no margin for the OEM.
When I bought my EEE E350 at $300 it was one of the pricier models, many B&M had the Atom netbooks in the $225-$255 range, by the time they had quit making them I had to find a refurbed Acer Aspire for my dad's GF because the EEEs were up to nearly $500.
Frankly I think the 12 inchers may make a comeback,possibly even the 10 inchers, by becoming Chromebooks or maybe Ubuntubooks simply because there is still money to be made on cheap and light netbooks but not with Windows as the OS, MSFT has priced themselves out of the market.
I know I'll be hanging onto my EEE 1215B until it dies (which the way I baby it will hopefully be a long time) even though I have a 17 inch C2D I could be using, simply because its so small and light its easier to carry anywhere, its a great little unit.
If ONLY!
I've wasted at least a month of man hour rebuilding those cheap pieces of excrement whenever they came back from travel. Hours to install the image, longer to update, not compatible with a modern OS. While they lasted they were the bane of my support life. Even more so that Local USERS who used CD trays a cup holders or constantly forgot their passwords. Whenever one came back from travel, I knew what I'd be working on for the next three days.
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