I've been beating myself up trying to understand why cheap 11" laptops aren't more common.
Ten years ago the atom based "netbooks" were ~$200-300. Yes, they had almost no RAM, eMMC storage, and archaic wifi chips, but it's been 10 years, and I'm surprised they can't still put out a Pentium Silver system with even slightly modern internals for around the same price now.
My best guess is volume. The netbook experiment failed and nobody is going to invest in a large enough volume of devices to make the costs worthwhile. Also, tablets and phones can do what you'd probably do on this device anyways, except for the form factor.
Still, it bugs me. This device has nice specs, but as others have pointed out, it looks like it's probably just been thrown together from a reference which also makes me worry about whether this company will be around long enough to service it if something goes wrong a year from now.
I guess I should just suck it up and buy a used 11" MacBook - there is one with an NVIDIA dgpu that my wife had at one point and it was quite a little power house.
Prices just seemed to hit an arbitrary floor without the technology being of higher quality to justify the still high price. Couldn’t a Chromebook have three or four year old tech at this point costing a half of the price?
Ten years ago the atom based "netbooks" were ~$200-300. Yes, they had almost no RAM, eMMC storage, and archaic wifi chips, but it's been 10 years, and I'm surprised they can't still put out a Pentium Silver system with even slightly modern internals for around the same price now.
My best guess is volume. The netbook experiment failed and nobody is going to invest in a large enough volume of devices to make the costs worthwhile. Also, tablets and phones can do what you'd probably do on this device anyways, except for the form factor.
Still, it bugs me. This device has nice specs, but as others have pointed out, it looks like it's probably just been thrown together from a reference which also makes me worry about whether this company will be around long enough to service it if something goes wrong a year from now.
I guess I should just suck it up and buy a used 11" MacBook - there is one with an NVIDIA dgpu that my wife had at one point and it was quite a little power house.