

Who killed the netbook? - pwg
http://www.itworld.com/print/176841

======
kleiba
I'll tell you the real reason why netbooks are going extinct: because I like
them. They're the ideal computing environment for me. And the world is
designed in a way that I can never be happy. Sorry, fellow netbook users...

When I first heard about netbooks, my jaw dropped metaphorically: this was
exactly the kind of device I had been waiting for all these years: small,
light, long battery life, GNU/Linux - and cheapo! Heck, I even had this secret
fantasy in which netbooks would finally herald GNU/Linux on the desktop (I
know, I should have been suspicious right then).

I'm not a casual user. I'm a hacker, I spend more time in front of my machine
then doing anything else (including sleeping). And yet I like being mobile!
I'm not a gamer. I don't watch movies on my computer. My laptop is not a life
style product, it's a tool, it's _the_ tool, a Swiss army knife if you will.
And let's be honest: you may call a netbook underpowered, but computers have
been fast enough already a couple of years ago for almost all serious tasks.
Sure, if a compile starts taking too long for my taste, I'll run it remotely
on a compute server next time: that's what puts the _net_ in netbook!

So I really thought, for once, things went right. I'd never have to spent huge
amount of cash on my next laptop again. From now on, it's only going to be
netbooks for me. Life is great!

Of course, _that_ couldn't last. Did I cheer too loud? Did I dare smile
happily in public? I don't know, but somehow the word must have gotten out:
_"Pssst! Did you hear? Kleiba seems to be happy!" -- "Oh, no worries, we can
change that easily..."_

And the next thing I know, tablets are kicking netbooks' asses... I mean:
_tablets_! What the heck? What am I supposed to be doing with them? Oh, oh, I
see, I'm supposed to use all the great "apps". Yeah, well, you know what? I
don't care about them. How can I _write_ my own apps? Oh, too bad, for that
you need a "real" computer (or be into BDSM)...

Sorry for the rant, folks! But are there other fellow hackers on HN who find
it ironic that while we are the backbone of the industry, while we are the
ones who enable others to use all their beloved tech in the first place, while
without us the big companies wouldn't see any dime - that the main stream
market doesn't care about us? That we are pushed into a niche, instead of
being pulled into the spotlight?

 _(Nah, I'm only being half serious...)_

~~~
wladimir
100% agree. The netbook is the perfect cheap portable hacking tool. You can
certainly get some development done on them (as long as you don't use eclipse
as IDE :-). Phones or iPads are generally more expensive and not nearly as
suited to that.

That's why I also get a bit sad at all the 'the netbook is dead!' posts. On
the other hand, it'll probably remain a niche for a long time. I mean, if you
believe the stories here, the phone is dead, e-mail is dead, the web is
dead... and so on.

It seems to be common here to forget that things can have a use and make some
people very happy without being "the great next mainstream thing".

~~~
rayiner
Cheap, yes, but I'm not sure "perfect" is the right word. Most netbooks are
just a bit too underpowered to run a modern IDE comfortably, and at the same
time they don't have particularly impressive battery life (3-4 hours of web
surfing is typical). An MBA 11" has a bigger screen, is tons faster, and will
get you 6+ hours of battery under similar circumstances. Sure it's $1000
versus $350, but are developers looking for a good portable hacking machine
that price sensitive?

~~~
wladimir
For a lot of things I feel I don't _need_ to run a modern IDE. Gcc + a text
editor does fine, or something light like Qt Designer. This is why I
explicitly added "if you don't use eclipse" :-) You have to be a bit creative
with resources, if you expect a full high-profile dev machine you're indeed
not well-off with a netbook.

And indeed, finding one with decent battery life can be a bit of a challenge.

And yes, $1000 versus $350 matters for a lot of people, we're not all silicon
valley rock stars. Also if you, for example, use the device in risky/dirty/etc
environments, you'd usually want to settle with something easily replacable.

------
bryanlarsen
Nobody killed the netbooks. They aren't dead.

[http://liliputing.com/2011/06/survey-netbooks-are-just-as-
po...](http://liliputing.com/2011/06/survey-netbooks-are-just-as-popular-as-
tablets-plenty-of-people-dont-care-at-all.html)

[http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/06/24/0426232/Who-
Kill...](http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/06/24/0426232/Who-Killed-the-
Netbook)

~~~
FilterJoe
Agreed. After reading this post, I looked on Amazon and saw that a variety of
EEE PC and Samsung netbooks are still for sale in the $200-$400 price range. I
also found that around 30 million netbooks are expected to be sold in 2011.
Not dead.

Given the subject of the post and the amount of detail the author went into, I
was disappointed that there was no mention (or links to posts) of any sales
numbers. Just the word dead, death, or killed mentioned 12 times.

------
dexen
`Smartphone' is only half the answer to `who killed the netbook?'. `The hype'
is the other half.

Perhaps surprisingly to us, the proverbial `average consumer' does not
understand performance and ergonomics aspects of hardware very well. To most
of them, an measly 7''...10'' screen seems just as good for productivity and
ergonomics as a decent 17'' or a tight 15''. They don't realize the storage
(be it harddrive or SSD) is much slower than in larger computers, and RAM is
underprovisioned. The hype was there, the price was right, and netbooks sold
like hot buns.

But one size did not fit all, and now we have some satisfied owners and some
dissatisfied ones. The admin at my workplace is very satisfied; a netbook is
his ternary computer (after a desktop and yes, an Android smartphone), it
delivers just what he needs when he's on the move. But the folks who bought a
netbook as their main computer are oft dissatisfied; the hardware simply did
not live up to the expectations. Heck, a decent smartphone (say, Nokia N950)
is pretty much as beefy as an average netbook.

The netbook rose by the hype, and now is `dying' by it: undergoing severe
market shrinkage, to match supply to actual demand for _cheap_ ultraportables,
probably as secondary device.

------
Wilya
Am I the only 'happy' netbook user out there ?

I'm still using a 2 year old HP netbook and pretty happy with it. It is light
enough that I can actually have it in my bag even when I don't explicitly need
it, and largely sufficient for any coding or web stuff.

And you can actually _work_ on it. Which isn't true (at least from my point of
view) of any smartphone or tablets. The app ecosystem isn't even remotely
comparable on that point.

~~~
rbanffy
No.

I am also happy with my first-gen Acer Aspire One.

------
regularfry
I don't know where the idea that Linux-based netbooks don't have an app
ecosystem comes from, but I wish it would go away. It's like apt-get doesn't
exist, or something.

~~~
AlexandrB
Apt-get is great, but it's not an app ecosystem. I suspect getting a
commercial app into the debian apt repositories would be near impossible.
Getting the user to install a third-party repository, on the other hand, is
nearly equivalent to having them just install the software.

Besides the considerations of HOW to get an app into apt-get - what if you
want to charge for it? Apt-get simply wasn't designed to distribute paid
software and you'd have to implement all the missing pieces yourself (account
management, payment processing, license management, in-app
purchases/upgrades). Doing this per-app is no better than the current
situation in Windows from a developer POV. Adding this functionality to some
derivative of apt-get, on the other hand, is HARD - besides the technical
challenges, you'd have to overcome legal issues with taking payments in a
variety of jurisdictions with different regulations and tax laws.

~~~
bryanlarsen
It may have been hard, but Ubuntu's already done it. The Ubuntu Software
Centre contains pay apps.

------
rheide
I dare say that the netbook is not dead at all for people who travel a lot. I
own an iPad and a very slow (WinXP) netbook myself, but I would prefer the
netbook over the iPad for travel any day. At least I have plenty of storage
space for my photos on my netbook and I can plug in whatever USB hardware I
want.

~~~
artmageddon
As I said in another comment, I use rail every day to and from work. For
coding, the netbook wins hands down. It runs a bare minimum WinXP setup(i.e.
no virus scanner or loads of services to start up), so I get done what I need
to. I'd much rather use it for photo processing / writing emails etc. also.

Of course, once I start needing remote connectivity for work, I'll have to use
the iPad.. the netbook battery only lasts around 1.5 hours.

------
angus77
I can see how the iPad is a direct competitor to the netbook market, but the
MacBook Air? I thought the comparisons were ridiculous at the time, and still
do. I have enormous trouble imagining someone actually trying to decide
between the two---price, size and specs were in completely different worlds.

~~~
bonaldi
Imagine harder. If you were a Mac user -- say you have a big Mac Pro or an
iMac -- and you wanted something small and portable as a secondary machine for
coffee shop and travel antics then you may well have found yourself
considering these netbook things.

Then the 11" Air came out, and turned that "should I get a netbook" into
"should I get a netbook which is very cheap but doesn't run my Mac apps or
should I pay a bit more and get the smallest Mac ever?"

Voila: someone trying to decide between the two.

~~~
angus77
Except that the first MacBook Airs were not 11", they were 17", and _those_
were the ones being compared to netbooks (because they were _light_ ). A while
later came the 13" models, and not until quite some time later did the 11"
models come out (at which point it would be safe to say it _was_ a netbook,
not _competing_ with netbooks).

EDIT: Wow, I need to have my memory checked. I must have been confused by the
$1700 price tag into thinking there was a 17" MacBook Air. I do distinctly
remember being baffled by reviewers comparing the first Airs to the EeePC,
though, as it seemed to me they weren't even aiming at the same markets.

~~~
goatforce5
Says here that the first Airs were 13.3":

[http://www.macrumors.com/2008/01/15/apple-announces-
macbook-...](http://www.macrumors.com/2008/01/15/apple-announces-macbook-air/)

------
wheels
I just ordered my first netbook yesterday. The main feature? It's disposable.

My main laptop is a Macbook Pro. It cost €1400. The netbook I ordered cost
€136 (used). I have a cheap cell phone because I lose my phone at least once a
year. There are situations where I'm uncomfortable dragging along my main
expensive laptop because it's major suckage if it get lost / stolen / damaged.
The netbook, with its 9.5 hour battery, combined with my mobile broadband
(with tethering), makes it fine to throw in the backpack when going camping
for the weekend (as I'll be doing next weekend). In a pinch if I need to write
a few mails or SSH into a server to check something out, I'm covered. On the
other hand, I won't cry very long if the thing gets trashed.

~~~
Auguste
The fact they are so disposable makes them great for travel or
university/school. I've used an Eee PC as a secondary computer ever since they
came out about 4 years ago. Do I care if it gets stolen or breaks? Not really.
With TrueCrypt and Dropbox, my data is safe and I'm only down ~$300 AUD.

~~~
pasbesoin
If you have to travel in/out of the U.S. or another jurisdiction known for
aggressive examination/confiscation, all the more so.

Or, just have what you need on a server, buy a netbook at the destination,
wipe it and give it to someone when you depart. (Be mindful of the limitations
of particularly but not only SSD wipes. Better to start off use with
encryption in place; any sacrificed blocks will be useless without the key.)
When the prices are low enough, this can be affordable, if not enjoyable.

I don't have particular secrets to hide, myself, but I don't like the idea of
"gubmint" freely rummaging through whatever it will. And when are data are
aggregated, we all have secrets. (E.g. insurance coverage or employment denial
because of family medical history or crazy Uncle Joey or whatever.)

------
tibbon
I've got a Windows desktop, Macbook Pro, iPad 2 and iPhone. Netbooks have
always seemed like a frustrating compromise. Keyboard just too small for me to
comfortably type on (might as well use my iPad), just enough power to actually
work properly for me, and yet another item to carry around.

I was really close to buying one a few times, and prior to my iPad it made
sense I think. Now, less so.

~~~
chadgeidel
I'm in the same boat - except replace the iPad with a netbook. I figured - why
get a "big iPhone" when I can have a real computer with an actual keyboard for
half the price?

I am sorely tempted to "trade in" the current netbook and Macbook pro for a
Sandy Bridge Macbook Air.

------
aristidb
Netbooks are painfully slow. I got myself a netbook (Samsung NC10 Plus)
recently, and while I don't regret it because I view it as an emergency
computer if I should spill water on my laptop, it isn't pleasant to use.

~~~
rjbond3rd
It depends on the processor. A low-end single-core Intel Atom is okay for
light browsing.

But some ultra-portables with dual-core CPU's are much zippier, e.g., the
Thinkpad x120e with the dual-core AMD Fusion E350.

~~~
dexen
For most uses it depends on memory too: both RAM and mass storage. A typical
user has a browser, an IM and some other window opened most of the time. A
bunch of systray icons, perhaps also antivirus, if MS Windows.

A typical netbook is underprovisioned in RAM and has slow storage to match;
pain both when starting up and in case of swapping VM pages. Topped up with a
joke of a GPU, likely using up access cycles of system memory instead of
having own dedicated RAM.

Less display estate (pixel-wise) means you have to Alt+Tab or scroll around
more often, too; sucking up your time.

So no, CPU doesn't have to be the only choke point in a netbook, and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law> kicks in.

~~~
rjbond3rd
Interesting. My case is perhaps unusual since I never use more than 800Mb of
RAM. I am running Linux, a browser and a terminal. So on all my machines, I
only have 1Gb installed and no swap.

I did add an SSD but other than boot time, did not get any benefit since
everything fits in RAM and there's no swap. So that's why I consider CPU to be
the bottleneck for me.

------
Ruudjah
Android and Chrome will revive the netbook. They are free (as in beer) OSes,
and run with very minimal hardware. As such, devices having one of both OSes
will be the OLPC replacement. As the third world has either very old or no
computer, those cheap devices will flood the market. Netbook formfactor will
be part of them, as desktop work will still be needed.

------
eftpotrm
Well, I certainly hope that reports of the netbook's death are in fact reports
of the death of the netbook's _hype_...

I'm another of those who find them almost perfect devices. It gets used for
real, serious, mobile computing. Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 on
a netbook with a long battery life make a wonderful go-anywhere productivity
device and let me work far, far more easily than I could otherwise because it
can just slip in the bottom of my bag. I can and do write music on it almost
anywhere in a MIDI sequencer. Firefox works well for regular browsing,
OpenOffice works well for note taking in meetings. I can touchtype on my
netbook with comparable speed and accuracy to any other device, certainly fast
enough to take notes live in a presentation. I won't claim it's fast enough
for doing any very heavy photography work but it's a very useful portable
preview and backing storage device.

Give me a tablet with a card reader and decent storage and I could do the
photography as easily on that, I'll concede. Give me a good mobile browser and
that's pretty much as good as on the netbook, though from my experience with
Android Firefox and Chrome I'm not convinced yet. Music? Maybe, I can see it
could be done but I'm not sure the apps are there yet from what I've heard.

The rest though? You want to show me someone typing at an accurate 100WPM on a
tablet without an external keyboard? (By which point I'd rather have them
integrated and a bit more rugged, personally.) You want to show me someone
doing serious software development on a tablet?

Small, light, cheap, compatible. Netbooks are all of these and let me Just Get
On With It. Tablets aren't.

------
tobylane
I'm hoping enough people know that there isn't much space between smartphones,
tablets ("there isn't a tablet market, there'a an ipad market") and normal
laptops. I'm keeping track of how much my mums netbook gets used now she has
an iphone, and the work laptop she often went to anyway.

It's a bit like drugs for Africa. Do we really need to be able to buy things
as cheaply as they do? No, $100, even $400 laptops are silly. I hope so at
least, I'm quite big and need space between keyboard and screen.

------
oddthink
I just wonder what the author thinks "fatuous" means. What on earth is a
"fatuous notebook"?

I do keep looking for a good netbook-like solution for recreational coding and
writing while traveling. If it can run emacs/gcc/X11 as well as a 1998-era
laptop, I'd be satisfied, but I can't quite find anything that's cheap enough
for that almost-throw-away use.

~~~
dablya
What about a used laptop?

~~~
krakensden
They're almost always broken, failing, or have no battery life left (and you
can't get replacements). It's much more trouble than it's worth.

------
nextparadigms
The problem with netbooks is they are very slow with Windows on them and most
of them still cost $500. For most people a tablet would offer a much better
experience overall for surfing the web.

But I think we'll start seeing a lot of ARM based _slim_ netbooks/low-end
notebooks with quad core 1.5 Ghz Tegra 3 chips that will cost under $250-$300
with either Chrome OS or Android, that will fulfill the netbook's purpose of
surfing the web very well for that price. I think a lot of people would still
prefer a machine that is half the price of iPad and has a real keyboard, for
surfing the web, and that will seem very fast, at least compared to an Atom
running under Windows 7.

I didn't read the article, but was he suggesting it was the Macbook Air that
killed the netbook? I think that's ridiculous. A macbook air is what
$1000-$1400? It wouldn't even be on most people's radar when looking for a
cheap mobile computer they can surf the web on.

~~~
todayiamme
>>> didn't read the article, but was he suggesting it was the Macbook Air that
killed the netbook? <<<

I'm sorry if this is rude, but I downvoted you. I did that because you didn't
bother to read the article, but you bothered to comment.

It's just isn't that simple. His argument for the MacBook Air is that it's in
the same form factor, while having incredible battery life and being more
powerful computationally. Plus, throw in OS X and you have a deal. In a way
Air is netbook inspired in terms of the form factor, and the it killed the
netbook by making the point that you could still pack in impressive features
into a form factor that small by conventional standards, while having a decent
profit margin.

In the article, the author makes the point that what really killed the netbook
was portable computing (in the form of smart phones and tablets) that packed
the same punch and was more intuitive, while maintaining a good enough profit
margin for hardware manufacturers to stampede in order to get into the
segment.

That said, I have a netbook, an Acer Aspire One, and it runs Ubuntu 10.10 with
a grin and is quite awesome once you get used to the tiny keyboard...

Besides, I really do think that no one is taking real advantage of modern
computing and you can still write Ruby code on Pentium 2 era PC once you flash
it and boil it down to the basics. I think that if someone is dedicated then
even a dumb terminal is enough to write code, why do you need that new found
computational power? This really is an honest question.

~~~
Goladus
I downvoted your post because the second sentence attacks the poster rather
than the post. It is impossible to you to know for sure whether someone read
an article or not before posting. Such a guess never adds anything to a
discussion. It is always possible to address flaws in a post without accusing
the author of not reading something.

~~~
todayiamme
I'm sorry if it sounds like I was attacking him, but I actually didn't mean
to.

The author admitted that he hadn't read the post...

P.S. - I'm a she not a he...

~~~
Goladus
Yeah my mistake there, sorry.

------
rayiner
One thing about the Linux point: why buy a computer whose major advantage is
portability and battery life, then give up a huge chunk of the latter by
putting Linux on it?

That's the thing that pissed me off most about my netbook. Windows sucks and I
couldn't put Linux on it without its shitty power management cutting a couple
of hours off the battery.

~~~
Auguste
When I first got my Eee PC 1000HA two or three years ago, I immediately
noticed that it got far better battery life on Windows - about 4 hours, as
opposed to 3 on Ubuntu and Arch Linux. That lead me to just stick with Windows
XP for a few years. Things seems to have improved now, though. I installed
Slackware 13.37 on it about a week ago, and it gets a full 4 hours:

    
    
      david@Fnord ~]$ acpi
      Battery 0: Discharging, 100%, 04:10:47 remaining
      [david@Fnord ~]$ uname -a
      Linux Fnord 2.6.37.6-smp #2 SMP Sat Apr 9 23:39:07 CDT 2011 i686 Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270   @ 1.60GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
    

I'd give Linux another shot on the laptop.

------
athst
I think they are giving the OLPC way too much credit for starting the netbook
trend. I remember that when it was introduced, one of the main criticisms was
that the industry was already making laptops almost that cheap anyway.

Onn the other side, they aren't giving near enough credit to the iPad, which
was pretty much the sole reason for the fall of netbooks. Netbooks were never
good products anyway (especially the OLPC), and while they demonstrated a
clear demand for mobile computing in a low price range, they were extremely
vulnerable for someone else to come along and create a better option for a
similar price. This was the iPad.

Look at the chart here: <http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/05/netbook-ipad/>

Netbooks were already slowing (imho because of just being inferior products)
and when the iPad was introduced, it's the last nail in the coffin.

------
xradionut
For some folks, (like my wife and many of her friends), the netbook is the
perfect computer. It's light enough to be taken anywhere and powerful enough
to fulfill the daily tasks for the casual user. For her, a touch typist, the
keyboard is infinitely more useful than a touch screen on a tablet. With a
extra 1GB of DRAM, Windows 7 runs well enough that she can use it for almost
all her personal needs sans the very few rare tasks, (encoding media or
database reporting), that may require the horsepower of my home workstation.

With the new hardware in the pipeline, I believe there is still a long life in
the netbook model to create a very portable computer with a real keyboard that
people will find useful and compelling. I'll probably wouldn't be using it as
the main development system, but I don't see a problem having a high battery
life, Linux/Windows machine that's easy to lug around. For the creator in me,
tablets don't cut it.

------
cycojesus
It's dying (is it?) because it's slow and not-so-useable.

Ok, I just say that because a netbook (Gigabyte Q1000C, 2g of RAM, Atom N470)
has been my main personal computing platform for some months now, but boy is
it painful! The thing even fails to finish moderately heavy compilation tasks
(eg. qemu or gcc). Oh, and it's made of subpar components too, the touchpad
doesn't handle even vertical scrolling! There's like 2 non-visible areas
tappable/touchable to go up and down... And the keyboard randomly decides that
it like the key I last pressed and keeps pressing it for me...

That rant passed it must be said that's I'm not a typical user and my wife use
her first gen Aspire One like nothing's wrong so maybe it's just me.

------
axiom
I'd say what killed it is that for $200 you can buy a decent used 13" laptop,
instead of spending $250-300 on a borderline unusable new 10" netbook.

~~~
eftpotrm
That assumes price is the only selling point. It isn't for me; I _like_ the
extra portability of the smaller machine. It goes to places a 13" wouldn't
because it fits in the bag more easily.

------
rexreed
I disagree with the premise of this article. Netbooks aren't dead. Therefore,
no one killed them.

