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.
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