A good stepping stone product, but netbooks weren’t destined to last long. Beyond the rosie tint of nostalgia, it was a pretty impractical device. Good enough display for DVD video, but no dvd drive or enough onboard storage to handle a selection of movies (at an acceptable encoding for the time, at least). Big enough to require a flat surface or a lap to type on but not powerful enough to justify it, and a very cramped typing surface at that.
Eventually they got replaced by tablets/convertibles, large phones, and ultrabooks. And all much better platforms in all ways, IMO.
I think you’re missing the key thing that netbooks did. Specifically: new, cheap, low power, and mobile cheap computing.
It didn’t matter how underpowered it was. Prior to the original netbook, the ASUS EEE 7", the alternative cheapest new computer you could buy was $600-$700. There was second hand computers cheaper, but they were a grab bag of reliability or results of abuse from the previous unknown owner.
These days that same niche is filled with $100 smartphones and $25 SoC comptuers like Raspberry Pi, but back then the EEE was a game changer for buying a computer, any computer, new for cheap.
Many of those other devices you mentioned had a market because the cheap netbook proved the market existed and was under served.
At the time there was no other way to get on the internet on the move than this except laptops which were really expensive then. This thing with a USB UMTS modem was just the coolest shit.
Lol, Dell had a tiny laptop in the late 90’s,was pretty slick. External CD and floppy. Ran NT4 great, and Win2k pretty well from what I recall.
HP had their “book” series then (850/650?), with a pop-out mouse. LOVED that thing. Ran 95, I think. Two PCCARD hot swap bays, double stack, so you could run 2 hard drives.
For a hot minute, I had a 9-inch screen Dell laptop that could barely run Windows 7.
These small form factor PCs were pretty cool at the time, I remember loving the little thing.
A good stepping stone product, but netbooks weren’t destined to last long. Beyond the rosie tint of nostalgia, it was a pretty impractical device. Good enough display for DVD video, but no dvd drive or enough onboard storage to handle a selection of movies (at an acceptable encoding for the time, at least). Big enough to require a flat surface or a lap to type on but not powerful enough to justify it, and a very cramped typing surface at that.
Eventually they got replaced by tablets/convertibles, large phones, and ultrabooks. And all much better platforms in all ways, IMO.
I think you’re missing the key thing that netbooks did. Specifically: new, cheap, low power, and mobile cheap computing.
It didn’t matter how underpowered it was. Prior to the original netbook, the ASUS EEE 7", the alternative cheapest new computer you could buy was $600-$700. There was second hand computers cheaper, but they were a grab bag of reliability or results of abuse from the previous unknown owner.
These days that same niche is filled with $100 smartphones and $25 SoC comptuers like Raspberry Pi, but back then the EEE was a game changer for buying a computer, any computer, new for cheap.
Many of those other devices you mentioned had a market because the cheap netbook proved the market existed and was under served.
It’s good with lightweight Linux distro and SSD. Still can’t do much beside the basic stuff, but much better than the Windows on HDD counterparts.
At the time there was no other way to get on the internet on the move than this except laptops which were really expensive then. This thing with a USB UMTS modem was just the coolest shit.
Lol, Dell had a tiny laptop in the late 90’s,was pretty slick. External CD and floppy. Ran NT4 great, and Win2k pretty well from what I recall.
HP had their “book” series then (850/650?), with a pop-out mouse. LOVED that thing. Ran 95, I think. Two PCCARD hot swap bays, double stack, so you could run 2 hard drives.
I remember the loud as fuck little fans and the barely running windows 7