Friday, January 25, 2013
Netbooks: The end of an error
Or perhaps it was the rise of the Ultrabook, an extremely
light-weight, thin, fully-functional laptop, that finally did in the tiny, underpowered
netbooks that were all the craze just a few short years ago.
But whatever the cause, as of Jan. 1, Asus and Acer, the
last two companies to make netbooks have ceased manufacturing them. Dell announced
it was through making netbooks back in December of 2011.
"Thin and powerful is where
it is at for us," said Alison Gardner, Dell's
marketing director, in an interview with
the online blog, The Verge She said the company was switching its focus over to developing higher-end,
premium mobile laptops like the Dell XPS 14z.
According to a recent article in England’s Guardian
newspaper, “Asustek and Acer were the only two
companies still making netbooks, with everyone else who had made them
(including Samsung, HP and Dell) having shifted to tablets. Asustek and Acer
were principally aiming at southeast Asia and South America - but of course
those are now targets for smartphones and cheap Android tablets.”
 |
The Asus Eee PC 701 was released on Oct. 16, 2007
and
featured and Intel Celeron Mobile 900 Mhz
processor, 512 mb of memory and a 4 gb
solid state hard drive.
|
Netbooks first burst onto the market back in 2007 with the
arrival of Asus’ Eee PC which was advertised as being highly portable,
affordable and having a decent battery life. Suddenly every PC manufacturer was
making its own version, but many users who bought them – including my wife –
were disappointed by their performance. They found them slow and kind of clunky
and it was hard to see everything in your Windows Start Menu or on your desktop
because it was squeezed down onto that tiny 10-inch screen.
By comparison, today’s ultabook laptops have bigger screens,
are just as light and portable as netbooks and offer a similar battery life,
but they are nowhere near as sluggish. On the other hand though, they do cost a
fair bit more than the netbooks did.
Yet manufacturers insisted that netbooks didn’t need all the
horsepower of regular laptops because they were mostly for browsing the web, checking
mail and doing things on the Internet, hence the term netbook (Internet + notebook).
But then in 2010, Apple came out with its first generation
iPad, which not only allowed you to do all that, but was even lighter, more
portable and faster than the netbook. By the end of the year, other
manufacturers began selling their own Android-based tablets and soon interest
in netbooks began to fall drastically.
A year later, tablet sales overtook netbooks, and as the Guardian reported, netbook shipments fell from 39.4 million in 2010 to 29.4 millon
in 2011, a 25 percent decline. In 2012 that trend accelerated with another tech blog citing netbook sales
falling by 34 percent over 2011.
So it should come as no surprise that the last two netbook
makers have finally decided to throw in the towel. It was an interesting
experiment and I’ll be curious to see if the current tablet craze mirrors the quick
rise and fall of the netbook.
Friday, January 11, 2013
Dog Daze
 |
| Our new family member, Merlin, getting used to his new bed and surroundings. So far this is the only good picture we can get of him because he's afraid of cameras! |
A lot has happened since my last regular posts.
A minor project to keep our upstairs from freezing in the
winter turned into a major garage/workshop renovation.
Hurricane Sandy swept through New Jersey and although it
thankfully did no damage to my house, it did knock out our power for months and
months. (Okay, it was really only about a week, but it seemed like months and
months to a tech-geek like me.)
Major changes at work have meant I've been putting in a lot
of overtime which has left me little time to do more than sleep and eat.
 |
He might be camera shy, but our new dog
Merlin, loves to be hugged. In fact that's the
only way we can get photos of him.
|
We adopted a new dog.
That's right, my wife and I are once again puppy-parents!
Regular readers of this blog may remember that we lost the
last four-legged member of our family about 15 months ago ("Still Tuggingat our heartstrings"), and
that his passing stuck me very hard. We only just started looking for a new dog
about four months ago, but had no luck.
Each time we thought we had found the perfect pooch for our
now two-person pack, the dog was either already adopted, wasn't the breed, type
nor temperament we were looking for or the animal rescue organization said we
weren't fit parents because both my wife and I work and their dog couldn't be
left alone during the day.
To say that we were both becoming a bit frustrated by the
process is an understatement, and I was now beginning to think we just would
not be getting another dog again. Fifteen months is a looonnnng time to go
between pets and I was already becoming very accustomed to the freedoms of not
having one. So when my wife asked me last Friday night if we were going to look
for dogs again on Saturday, I said yes reluctantly.
It's not that I didn't want a dog. I just didn't expect that
our visits to the local shelters would turn out any differently than they had
in the past. In fact, I was ready to call it quits if we didn't find a dog by
that day.
So of course, you know what happened.
After checking out a few more places and yet again coming up
empty-handed we happened to pass our local country store, which sells lawn and
live-stock supplies, and my wife noticed that they were having their monthly
pet adoption event that day. So just for the heck of it we turned in, and
that's when we saw him.
They were calling him Abe, and he was a little 2-year-old
black Lab mix who kept pulling himself up on top of the puppy playpen to be
petted by anyone who passed by.
I can't say that it was love at first sight. But he was
cute, affectionate and seemed rather calm. We took him for a walk and my wife,
who's a good judge of dogs (not to mention husbands!) gave him the thumbs up.
Then she asked me the question, which a few months ago I
would not have thought twice about.
"Do you really want a dog?"
Strangely I hesitated.
I missed having Tug around and love playing with and being
around our neighbor's dogs. So why now was I so unsure?
Was it because I had been suckered into briefly fostering
another Lab mix this past summer who turned out to be a little terror? Or was
it because suddenly it hit me that my carefree "childless" days were
over?
I think it was the latter.
As I said, 15 month is a long time to go without a pet and I
can now understand why some people go right out and get another dog immediately
after their last one has died. It's very easy to get used to not having to
worry about running home to take care of your dog or cat and doing whatever you
want, whenever you want. The idea that I was giving all that up for at least
another 12 years terrified me.
In fact, all of last weekend I kept second-guessing myself,
wondering if I had made a terrible mistake. I kept thinking about all that
new-found freedom I had given up and was scared of all the bad things this new
dog would do until we eventually got him trained. I think now for the very
first time, I understand what new fathers go through when they either learn
their wife is pregnant or the mix of emotions they feel when they hold their
first newborn child.
But now just after a few days, I've fallen back into my old
"doggy dad" routines and my fears are all but gone. Thankfully our
dog, whom we've decided to call "Merlin," has proven to be pretty
well-behaved and seems just as laid back
-- if not more so -- than all our other dogs combined.
I'm sure there will be a few challenges with him down the
road. But for now I'm happy to hear the pitter-patter of four paws on my floors
again.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)