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I actually think the OLPC was a big step in making computers more accessible. Netbooks were entirely a response to the OLPC, when companies like Asus noticed th

I actually think the OLPC was a big step in making computers more accessible. Netbooks were entirely a response to the OLPC, when companies like Asus noticed that there was a gaping, totally unserved market for low-end notebooks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC These netbooks (and especially imitators running Windows that came soon after the eeepc) were very commonplace - especially amongst university students - when I was living in East Africa in the early 2010's. They were, as you say, really cheap and effective enough. Eventually phones have caught up for many use cases, but they certainly weren't there at the time...

e4e78a06 5y ago
Their market penetration for the general population definitely wasn't great though. A big reason IMO was they didn't have a cellular data connection and cell infra hadn't yet been sufficiently developed with good speed and coverage. 2G/3G pretty much universally sucked even in its later forms. Also speaking as someone who used netbooks throughout my time in K-12 ed, they were woefully underpowered and laggy compared to today's low end smartphones. A $80 Xiaomi phone can probably run most websites/apps at 60 fps, a 11 inch netbook with crappy internal HDD/EMMC and single core Atom, not so much.