2012: The year that netbooks DIED

There is a pretty good netbook made by HP with an i3 processor afaik it is still made.

Ultrabooks still look flimsy as hell. (Maybe there is a Toughbook one ?).

No reason that decent netbooks couldn't be made using AMD Fusion (Or the next in the range of Bobcat etc).

Problem with Netbooks is they won't give you enough vertical pixels. (Or even horizontal).

1650x1050 would probably be ok. 2G RAM. SSD.

If you are the only one in a market you should be able to do pretty well.

(I don't want another tablet or an ultrabook).

They all seem to be set in such a way that for what I want I have to pay a fortune for things that until relatively recently were standard features.

I am looking for a replacement for my IBM Thinkpad X31 but I want similar build quality and a Matte screen. Not bothered about weight (As long as it is the same or less) or thinness. I have had this for at least 5 years (Maybe a little longer) years and it is just about starting to need replacing. (I don't put any effort into taking care of it never have). Not many choices for someone like me. (Might just get a second hand semi rugged Toughbook).

Only one advantage?

What bollocks. Netbooks had price, weight and, most importantly, battery life.

Price was the least of it's advantages. The cheap Shitty end of the laptop compuetrs was with £130 of, say, an eee901 so hardly a huge leap if you are just buying one.

No, the true advantage came with the 1 kg weight (compare to crippling 3.5 KGs for your £350 laptop) and the battery life measure in hours rather than minutes for a laptop. A 90 min battery life is not a f'ing 'portable'. A battery life of 6 hours (now 9 is typical in a netbook) is.

And given that I did python and flex development in Eclipse on my 901 I fail to see how they were underpowered. The thing that killed the netbook was the release of the iPad causing all the manufacturers to pull their (often very advanced) plans for ARM netbooks. Hacking another £60-£100 off the price of a netbook would have been huge.

Don't forget Hackintoshes

I've got a couple of Dell's (9" and 10") which I bought specifically because they could be easily used to run OSX on them (including install from a standard OSX installation DVD).

At the time, Apple didn't have anything in the form factor I wanted (the closest was the original MacBook Air).

Stopped using them since I got a MacBook Air 11" - which I guess confirms the point about ultrabooks killing off netbooks (in an OSX kind of way).

Well there's a surprise

More proof (along with the screen sizes fiasco) that the PC industry has completely forgotten how to serve its customers with products they want.

Give me a better version of my HP Mini netbook (eg. back-lit keyboard, better screen, HDMI out, faster/cooler CPU) and I'll buy it..

Give me an ultrabookish notebook with a proper hi res screen, and I'll buy it.

What, you can't? Not buying anything then.

They should have gone further

I mean Netbooks seemed interesting as they were small, yet had a proper keyboard. However today you can get second hand X-Series Thinkpads for about the same amount of money, and those will even include UMTS modules for mobile Internet. Netbooks were just simply small portable unixoid workstations.

I estimate that the ideal point would have been somewhere near the Nokia Communicator. A device with a screen at least 640-800 pixels wide (so you won't have to scroll horizontally) and a keyboard.

I still have my Samsung NC10 running Windows 7, does the job perfectly. Granted, it is not used half as much now that I have an iPad, but I still use it for Office and use TeamViewer to remote into my desktop media centre for maintenance tasks. Touch screens still don't quite have the right control over keyboard and mouse OS's

My take on netbooks

The intel atom is not a bad processor, and can run windows quite happily. Hell my parents computer runs an intel atom board (the 2nd version) with 1 gig of ram(it makes the last gen of netbooks look extremely powerful) and for what they need the PC for it works great, They never once complained about the speed of this one, but they complained all the time about the old board that fried as the comp had all that background junk installed that comes pre-installed(and the old board was a P4 2.5ghz on top of it)

Also have a Dell 10something sitting here from my sister, as she got fed up with the hard drive cable falling out every 1-2 weeks(seriously why didn't they secure it in) which is the only reason she replaced it. She complained about how slow it was the day she got it as it had so many background trial applications running it wasn't funny. After I re-installed windows clean she never complained about speed.

I don't see it as it was much of an issue with the processors speed with windows that caused its death. The issue as I see it was from the manufacturers had 4-10 programs running in the background that make the newest of processors run like shit on a processor not meant for it. So pretty much they destroyed the line themselves because lets face it the standard person doesn't know to uninstall everything that is running on a new PC to make it not preform like shit.

Old I Are

Perhaps it is just an age thing.

But to me Netbooks and Ultrabooks are just odd names for Laptops.

Back in the day we could save money by getting Cheap underpowered Laptops, or big expensive gaming Laptops. Then someone decided to give those products specific names. Some Laptops are better than "Ultrabooks" and some "Netbooks" are better than Laptops. I think it was all just a marketing ploy. Now that they sold enough "Netbooks" they tell the world they are out of style and users now need to buy "Ultrabooks" instead.

Still in use

I still use my Aspire One machines. Until recently, one of them was even my main Linux dev machine, albeit using a WinXP and then Win7 machine running Cygwin to provide a more usable daily environment. Until recently they were running Mint 9 LXDE, now they're running Mint 13 XFCE.

With a few mods (max RAM expansion, internal Bluetooth, larger SSD and a 9-cell battery), it's still a reasonable machine for on the go, and indeed has been places I wouldn't want to take its larger brethren.

Certainly not bad for machines that are four years old. A shame if the form factor is disappearing, I still prefer the netbook to a tablet.

Semantics

So the original "netbooks" were small, affordable devices running, at first, Linux and then Windows.

And now five years on we still have small, portable devices running a sort-of variant of Linux (Android) and Windows, except now we call them tablets/convertibles.

But Atom lives on! Death of netbook in name only

There are certainly plenty of ultra-portable laptop/tablet hybrids being planned that are based on Clover Trail, the next generation SoC Atom, that will be a lower cost lower powered (and also better battery life) alternative to the i3/i5/i7 devices. It will be interesting see if we also get Clover Trail devices that are pure laptops - anyone know?

Part of the problem is, what is the definition of a "netbook"? If we define it as a machine with Atom CPU, 1GB RAM, 1024x600, then I'm glad that spec is finally dead - but that makes no more sense than saying a tablet is a device with 512MB RAM, and saying tablets are dead. If we define it as a low cost ultra-portable, then is it still true that netbooks will disappear?

If in 2013, I can still buy a lower end portable laptop, I don't care whether it's called a netbook, ultrabook, ultra-portable or whatever else - it's still the same thing. But if lower end portable laptops no longer exist, and the only choice is tablets, much more expensive (and poorer battery life) high end ultra-portables, or the remaining stock of old netbooks, that's a bit sad.

I love my Samsung N220, and have no desire to replace it with a less functional tablet. What will the upgrade path for it be?

"Meanwhile, the original netbook concept of a compact, ultraportable PC has reemerged in the form of Ultrabooks, Intel's attempt to encourage PC makers to develop devices to compete with Apple's extra-slim MacBook Air."

Well high end ultra-portables existed long before Apple joined the market late (as always). The key new thing about netbooks was the lower cost (and better battery life). Ultrabooks were nothing to do with Apple, they were a continued trend of ultra-portables, with Intel making up a trademark for better marketing. Ultrabooks are falling in price so could well eventually fill the place of netbooks anyway.

"by 2016 virtually every notebook will resemble an Ultrabook, leaving the netbook era as little more than a quaint and whimsical memory."

Or rather, the netbook was the immensely successful revolutionary device that later evolved into the devices we'll be using in 2016. By 2016, I suspect ultrabooks will be at the same price as netbooks - the reason for calling them ultrabooks will simply be a matter of marketing ("ultrabook" is an Intel trademark; netbook is simply a generic name, and one that's now become old fashioned).

Not to mention Chromebooks, effectively netbooks too (low cost, portable, good battery life). Ironically Chromebooks used to be viewed as pointless as you could just get a netbook, but soon Chromebooks might be the only thing in that market you can buy!

Typing on one right now

I'm sitting in a villa on holiday at the moment and wasn't going to lug around a large laptop. So I took an HP Mini 210 with me. This is a really basic netbook but it still manages to let me run eclipse, games, word processors and other stuff and fits into a smallish zip neoprene case which in turn goes in my carry on case. It's a fantastically useful form factor made more so by the price.

If the netbook market is disappearing its not because these devices are not useful, but because manufacturers sense more profit in other markets where they can charge an arm and a leg - tablets and ultrabooks. When this netbook packs in I'll probably forced to get an ultrabook, not because I want to but because the netbook market will be barren by that point.

netbook v windows 8

Very happy with my eeePC for use on the road. However the maximum screen resolution is insufficient to launch from 'Metro'; have to click through to the traditional desktop in order to run anything. Bit annoying.

My netbook

Has been relegated to the position of a server, I saved a fortune in electricity from using that over having my standard desktop on 24/7. A slightly fancier NAS than i have would likely eliminate the need altogether though.

I had high hopes for it, but as stated in the article its just too small and with a rubbish screen. It's pretty much been replaced as my portable machine by a thinkpad x61 I picked up off eBay, better screen, better keyboard, better processor and about half the price.

I like my eeePC 901!

Runs Windows. And a bunch of development stuff. And a RISC OS emulator with full dev kit for that. Plus plenty of songs/animé on a 32Gb SD card. It didn't cost a lot, it is small enough I can pop it into a backpack. It runs for ages on its battery. And I can use it in the car on rough country roads without worrying about trashing the harddisc going over potholes and the like (BTW, I'm not the driver, before anybody wonders...). Although, to be honest, it's main use is to sit on my stomach while I'm in bed so I can watch movies and generally be a lazy lump. (^_^)

I know its specification is not the best. I had to up the memory to 2Gb to get Firefox and Thunderbird running side by side without stuff falling over. It isn't up to H.264 HD (but can cope with HD XviD okay). I can't say about games as I'm not really a games person. It runs VisualBasic and various other compilers without too much struggle. I figure it might take the machine a little longer to do things (like transcoding to XviD for recordings from my Android phone) but, you know, it is older slower hardware. I live with it.

One of the very best features, by far, was the adaptive WiFi when my older Livebox only offered the b/g types. The eeePC 1001 I got my mother, and both of my Android phones, would lock in at 54mbit and stay there. Given this is a rural property with metre-thick stone walls, it is quite feasible that I can be in my bedroom approximately eight metres away from the Livebox, and struggle to get any sort of connection. The 901, however, would adapt, dropping the speed as low as 2mbit and raising it as conditions require. This is less of a problem now that my newer Livebox offers b/g/n and the other hardware seems to realise that it too can adapt, but even so my phones don't live to go below 65mbit. My eeePC, side by side with the phone, is running at 13mbit. Guess which one can stream reliably and which one cannot.

All in all, I have been very happy with my netbook; and when its is time for an update to newer hardware, I will have to search around for something that offers a reasonable specification in a form factor as close as possible to that of the netbook range. I accept that netbooks were not for everybody, however for those who took to them, they will be missed.

I'll still keep Mine

I've had an Asus Eee for a few years now. I loaded Ubuntu on it 3 minutes after it came out of the box. I use it as a system console on the computer floor if I have to get into a Sun box or HP iLo. Beats the crap out of lugging around a bloated Lenovo laptop

User over-optimistic rather than netbook under-powered

I always thought anyone who bought a netbook and then complained it was underpowered was either missold or over-optimistic. It's an Atom with a gig of ram and a low res display. Don't expect too much!

I've had an Asus 1001P for a few years now. It's not my main machine; I bought it for travelling. I wanted long battery life, wireless, ethernet, USB, VGA out, SD card slot and most of all cheap! We used it to keep our then toddler entertained with her favourite TV shows on long haul flights (10hr plus). Once on holiday, it got plugged into the hotel TV and used for uploading photos from the camera, emails, booking the next hotel room, facebook updates etc. I don't like travelling with expensive equipment, always that slight niggle of where's-my-bag at the back of your mind, so the low-cost was important.

I'm not sure that there is anything out there other than a netbook that can replace the feature set above. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it revolutionised our travels (that and free wifi in budget hotels/hostels ;-).

With age, the battery died, the keyboard has some quirks and the mouse-pad only works if I enter the BIOS first on booting up (never worked that one out!). It still gets used daily though (writing this on it) despite being tied to the mains. It's the kids computer at home, the lounging around balancing it on one knee machine and it is still machine I reach for when packing the bags for foreign lands.

I think there is always room for such a device. Long battery life, proper keyboard, light, cheap, and with enough ports to be useful.

Just to pile on to this thread . . .

My little Toshiba NB305 has been my workhorse portable device for 3 years. Cellular internet, 40gb SSD, 2GB DRAM and Win7Pro has made this a very capable device for most all of my computing in spite of the little Atom CPU. Yes I have invested about US$400 on it (not counting the windows licence I have with MS ActionPack), but an equivalent ipad or small notebook would be much less functional for me. I know it is not sexy but that has its advantages as I'm far less concerned about this device being nicked. Hopefully the manufacturers were right about the lack of demand in the market and I'll be able to buy a couple at discounted prices.

My Dell Mini 9 with OSX Snow leopard, ran surprisingly well with only 1GB RAm and booted faster than a Macbook of the day due to it's SSD. OSX was £22 from Amazon.

4-5 years ago plenty of people were still using old Beige boxes for office work and light gaming. Those old boxes could happly be replaced with a Netbook attached to an external monito and keyboard. Netbooks were fine if you didn't mind keeping a couple of steps behind with software. Very convenient form factor at a cheap price.

Sadly Netbooks got a lot of bad press as vociferous newcomers to computing tested them, pointed and laughed as the Atom chip struggled to run the latest office suites, intensive web based apps and latest 3D games.

I imagine if a Raspberry Pi type Netbook scene was made possible, people would stop pointing and laughing and embrace cheap computing again.

Good riddance

That's it really.