Netbooks were there first, though. The first wave of them is probably what spawned the Atom product line. (The very first of them had weird little Celerons th

Netbooks were there first, though. The first wave of them is probably what spawned the Atom product line. (The very first of them had weird little Celerons that downclocked to like 660MHz for thermal reasons because there wasn't anything explicitly designed for purpose) The fact Microsoft is subsidizing them to ensure they run Windows doesn't mean that a netbook as we know it wouldn't exist today without them. They'd still be on the market, likely running some poorly skinned Linux distribution like those "computers for seniors" they advertise in Parade magazine; or maybe Android-x86 would have gotten more support from OEMs and evolved into something usable as a daily driver. The story has already been established for consumers: if you don't need games or performance, someone will sell you a portable device which will run an office suite and a web browser for USD200 or less. It's interesting to discuss how much "it runs Windows/uses an x86 CPU" is part of the narrative-- would a $150 ARM laptop running a nicely packaged Linux suite with LibreOffice sell? I suspect there's no way out of the crappy laptop sector though. Even after the Vista Basic fiasco, I can't see Microsoft outright antagonizing OEMs by saying "Windows Next won't run on anything below some minimum spec that would provide an actually good experience, so goodbye $79 tablets with a gig of memory and 16 of flash"