
A Democracy of Netbooks - Anon84
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001318.html
======
michael_dorfman
_I don't care how "smart" your smartphone is, it will never escape those
corporate shackles. Smartphones are simply not free enough to deliver the type
of democratic transformation that netbooks -- mobile PCs cheap enough and fast
enough and good enough for everyone to afford -- absolutely will._

In Europe, at least, smartphones are sold unlocked, and can be used with any
WiFi-- so I don't really see in what sense they are "not free enough", or
shackled to any corporation.

~~~
jackowayed
They also usually fail the "Runs my software." criterium. The most smartphones
still have gatekeepers on what software you can install on them (with the
iPhone being the primest example). And even the ones that let you install any
software don't usually let you install software that can do anything because
of security concerns.

Hopefully Android will win and this won't be an issue, but for now it
definitely is.

~~~
rimantas
General population does not have this problem. They do not care about feature
lists, MHzs of CPU, they do not count watts and do not carry replaceable
batteries. They do not give a damn how open or how closed the ecosystem is.
Either device works for them or it does not. I guess very few geeks get that,
and Jeff is sure not one of them. And it would be a mistake to think that
Apple is going to release something along the lines of the slate MS presented
at CES. The rumor goes, that Jobs has asked, what good the the new tablet
device could do besides browsing internet in the restroom. I guess they are
not going to release one if it does not have an answer to this question.

~~~
waterlesscloud
The general population cares about being able to do what they want to do on
their machines. If there's software people really want they they aren't
"allowed" to run on their machine by the gatekeepers, they will, as they have
countless times in the past, vote with their wallets.

------
samuel
I wouldn't call that "thing" a netbook, but a small laptop. The iBook was
about the same size and nobody called it a "netbook".

For me "a netbook" it's something similar to a product really called Netbook,
the Psion Teklogix's "Netbook Pro". It was a little laptop with touchscreen,
flash storage, and an Xscale processor running Windows CE.

I used to work for a warehousing company, and warehouse managers loved it.
They could browse the Intranet, run a TN5250 terminal, answer email, etc... at
any point of the warehouse, carrying almost no weight and, the most important
thing, with near zero waiting time. It just booted in seconds. It was
outrageusly expensive, may be something like 2000eur.

I understand that's the device Google has envisioned for its Google OS (but
much cheaper obviously). A non-x86 CPU, flash storage, may be a touchscreen...
something just different from the laptop you would use to run Windows, not
just smaller.

~~~
gwern
> I wouldn't call that "thing" a netbook, but a small laptop. The iBook was
> about the same size and nobody called it a "netbook".

I agree. I'm surprised Jeff missed the obvious rhetorical reply: 'Netbooks
aren't lame laptops; laptops are lame netbooks.'

(And then one would go on to enumerate the advantages of size, battery-life,
etc. and give the little mini-history of computer trends.)

------
Zak
I'm not sure about being cheaper without the Microsoft tax. A few months ago,
I was browsing a variety of netbook models and found no significant discounts
for Linux. Dell actually charged _more_ for Ubuntu than XP on one model.

I think the reason is all the bundled trial software; they make enough money
from the bundling to offset the Windows license and maybe even make a little
profit. I think this, more than any pressure from Microsoft, cooperative
marketing or lack of user demand is the reason PC manufacturers are reluctant
to offer Linux and make it hard to find when they do.

------
wvenable
The thing I find with netbooks is that almost everyone is universally happy
with them: geeks and non-geeks alike. It seems the only people really
complaining are technology writers looking for more readers.

~~~
Xichekolas
People are happy with netbooks unless they expect their laptop to be a desktop
replacement.

As the owner of a nice beefy desktop, I find my eeepc to be delightful. Hour
for hour, I probably even spend more time on it, but I never have to feel the
frustration of not being able to do something, because I have my desktop
machine.

~~~
wvenable
Most netbook owners I know also have laptops (usually as their primary desktop
replacement). So I guess laptops have becomes desktops and netbooks have
become laptops as far as people are using them now.

------
iamelgringo
I did a lot of transatlantic flying this past year. I bought an acer aspire
one, gave it 2gb of ram, bought a 9 cell extra battery, installed windows 7
ultimate and never looked back. Between both my batteries, I have 16 hours of
constant laptop usage. It's enought to get me from barcelona to san francisco
without a plug in.

I really couldn't be happier. I just never think about running out of power
any more. And, I have a full dev box at my disposal that's lighter and smaller
than most of the books I carry around with me to read.

------
rauljara
He seems big on the "no monthly contracts" thing. But an increasing number of
netbooks are being sold with data plans, and there's no reason to think this
trend won't continue. Consumers prefer the monthly fees and subsidized
purchase price to the lump sum buy-it-all-at-once price, even though it ends
up costing them more. The idea that you can buy a semi-useful service and get
an essentially free netbook is a very psychologically (if not economically)
appealing notion, and one that I am sure companies will increasingly exploit.

------
3pt14159
A very philosophical approach, but the main reason I have a netbook is that I
can carry it with one hand and it does most of what I need a computer to do. I
can read man pages about wget on the bus, I can test out little Ruby ideas I
have and see what happens. I can send out a quick message to my friends. Just
a really neat little machine. Now that being said, I don't have a smart phone
(data plans were too expensive for my tastes) or a regular laptop (too heavy)
so maybe my netbook partially fills two technological gaps in my life.

~~~
antidaily
Same here. Pretty happy with the Dell Mini 9 (1.6ghz atom w/ 2gb ram and 16gb
ssd) I bought a year ago. It was around $340 and I was able to put Windows 7
RC on it. It's been great for vacations and meetings where I don't want to lug
around (or risk theft of) my macbook pro. It's pretty fast too.

------
drewcrawford
I don't know... I wonder if the netbook thing is a fad.

I bought an eeepc. I spent a few weeks hackintoshing / writing drivers for it.
That was fun, I guess. It runs sloooow as molasses though. I can see Steve's
point.

Tried a few Linux distros... all were either too slow or not powerful enough.
Maybe I should try Windows 7?

I don't know if I've just gotten addicted to my dual-core MBP or what. But the
aggregate cost of waiting another second or so each page load makes me want to
scream inside.

~~~
keltex
I happen to be recovering from the flu and I spending part of the day hanging
out on the couch. Instead of dragging my 15" notebook, I grabbed my recently
purchased Acer (1810TZ- same form factor but slightly more powerful than the
1410 in the article).

It's an amazing machine. 11" screen. Dual Core. 3GB RAM. 300 GB HD. 8 hrs of
battery life. Pretty good build quality. And I can really do my work on it.
$550 shipped.

I really can't think of what Apple is going to deliver with their tablet that
at twice the price and no keyboard is going to be any better than this
machine.

~~~
amanfredi
Jobs' comment about build quality certainly rang true with me: My 1st
generation eeePC basically fell apart after a year.

~~~
alaithea
We have an eeePC at our house. It is one of the seashell models and only 3-4
months old. About two weeks ago, the power supply blew. Once we got a
replacement power supply and were able to turn the eeePC back on, the screen
had a large, wave-shaped swath of dead pixels at the bottom edge, so bad that
the taskbar needed to be moved to the top, in order for Windows to still be
usable. I've never had a laptop fail so hard, so soon.

------
netcan
It is very bizarre that netbooks, of all things, are something that people
react to in such an idealistic (not sure if that it the right word) way.

There are some interesting debates like cloud vs local power or reinventing
(touch screen) vs tweaking (small keyboard) embedded but you can talk about
these separately if they are really what you are getting at. Netbooks are just
another range of options in the computer family alongside normal laptops,
desktops, desktop replacements, workstations, etc.).

Why would anybody possibly object to that? I mean there are plenty of reasons
for plenty of people not to by one (I don't have one) or not to _personally_
like them (eg can't adjust to the keyboard).

Why do people object to (or defend) their existence?

------
iuguy
My netbook is an old Sony Vaio SRX51P/B that I bought for £2000 back in 2001.
It had sat on the shelf for a couple of years as the Lucent Orinoco WiFi
chipset didn't support WPA, had 256mb of RAM and the hard drive kept crapping
out.

I recently put a 30gb hard drive in, an atheros USB wifi stick and installed
Arch Linux on there and it's fantastic. It's not as quick as a modern laptop
but is more than capable of basic browsing and xterm-based fun. Aside from the
two years that I haven't used it, the overall cost works out at roughly £250
per year. It has a 10.4" screen and aside from the memory is roughly
comparable to an EEE PC 701 in terms of performance.

I'm more than happy with it and it still holds a charge, 9 years later.

------
nzmsv
I wonder if Chrome OS would still fit the requirement of "runs my software".
Yes, you can navigate to any web app you want, but there is no control of the
hardware.

~~~
jmtulloss
I think there will be more control of hardware as time goes on. Palm provided
methods of accessing hardware in the browser for webOS, I suspect Google will
do something similar for web pages that you give permission to.

