I'm interested by the nosedive in attention to netbooks.
Obviously the media has gotten bored and moved onto tablets, but have consumers really moved past netbooks? I thought they filled a real niche and would be significant for a lot longer
I see a lot more real people using netbooks as opposed to tablets. Tablets still seem like a toy for older rich folks while netbooks are a viable cheap computing option for a lot of people who don't need a machine that does any heavy lifting.
There's a difference between significance and buzz. Netbooks were refinements of the laptop at a better price point. I don't think either category is going away anytime soon. Heck, given that even netbooks let you drive a desktop widescreen display, it's astonishing that desktop machines are still kicking around.
I'm obviously not a member of the iPad's target audience -- they can have my keyboard when they can pry my cold dead fingers from it, etc. But I appreciate the appeal of computers that can be held in one hand. Over the years I've had several mini-laptops (anyone remember the Toshiba Librettos or the Sony Picturebooks?) In most respects the netbook has hit the sweet spot for me.
I just switched from a 13" macbook pro to an 11" macbook air.
Budget aside, I see no advantage of a netbook over my macbook air. It's the ultimate ultra-portable machine. The comment everyone has about netbooks is that they are slow. The Macbook air zips along fine (the advantage of an SSD and a real processor...), and the high res screen makes my old 13" macbook feel cramped.
Once again, this is budget aside. But budget isn't the only reason netbooks were a hit. Their highly portable nature and great battery life were two other big selling points.
Apple never made a netbook because the profit margins weren't good enough, and tech media geeks, even if they weren't all Apple fans, would still probably spend 5 times as much on their laptop because they're often geeks who travel a great deal on business. So online buzz was limited to actual customers.
This led to the strange spectacle of Apple pundits fainting at the ability to watch Youtube in bed on their iPads, which ordinary poor folk had been doing for years with much loved netbooks.
If you notice extreme negativity to netbooks online, it's usually coming from Apple-centric folk dealing with the cognitive dissonance of Apple openly and clearly sacrificing their customer's utility for profits. People who use them seem to love them. (See also the love for the MacBook Air, summed up by this comic: http://classicfun.ws/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Bill-Gates-a...)
Obviously the media has gotten bored and moved onto tablets, but have consumers really moved past netbooks? I thought they filled a real niche and would be significant for a lot longer