5 ms·
I find this a little misleading, because netbooks are very rarely someone's sole computer, and they seem to deliberately omit the growing sales of Macbooks and
by ojbyrne 18y ago
I find this a little misleading, because netbooks are very rarely someone's sole computer, and they seem to deliberately omit the growing sales of Macbooks and Macbook Pros (which aren't cheap) to make the story more convincing.
In fact, I'd say that this is a bit of a microsoft biased story in that the emphasis is "Microsoft can't compete on price" (which they can frame as "we don't want to compete on price") when in fact MS is losing at both the top end and the bottom end of the market.
- tdavis 18y agoI have a laptop myself, but they can have my multiple monitors and powerful desktop when they pry them from my cold, dead fingers...
- GavinB 18y agoThe $250 netbook may not cut it, but I'm writing this on a brand new $400 laptop that has plenty of processing power, 2 gigs of ram and a decent graphics card. This power would have cost over $1500 two years ago. When the computer costs the same as the operating system, people will be more willing to play around with which operating system they use. You're absolutely right that Microsoft is going to get squeezed from both directions by Linux and Mac. The most likely near-term consequence is that Microsoft may be pushed out of the home market if they don't introduce a relatively cheap home OS.
- fauigerzigerk 18y agoBut hasn't Apple's revenue shifted away from desktops and notebooks towards phones and consumer electronics as well? The article makes a point that there could be disruptive change on its way that leaves the world with much less relative, general purpose computing power in homes and small businesses. I don't think that is disproved by Apple's success.
- potatolicious 18y agoDesktops yes, but their notebook sales are still strong. In the college market that I'm in I see a lot of netbooks being used as the only computer... so food for thought. A lot of people genuinely do not see the value in paying $1K+ for a computer, and are willing to live with the poorer performance.
- fauigerzigerk 18y agoI don't actually have the figures but I believe that their computer business is a smaller part of their overall revenue than it was in the past. I know it's still growing, but the trend is even visible with Apple I think. I could be wrong though.
- potatolicious 18y agoIt's true - the iPhone and iPod now makes up the bulk of Apple's revenue. That being said, sales of their laptops are still growing by leaps and bounds (well, until recently anyway). There is still a large market out there for high-end laptops.
- c1sc0 18y agoI recently got a Lenovo s10 and I'm considering using it as my main development workstation (hooked up to decent monitor & keyboard, doing mostly Python stuff) after spending some time traveling with it: I absolutely love this tiny laptop and I could easily imagine people using it as their sole machine.
- jrockway 18y agoI feel the same way about my eeepc 901. Everything is fast enough.
- dhimes 18y agoThis is exactly what happened to me. I bought a cheap laptop to ensure my mojo worked in Vista. I made it a dual-boot with fedora to play with linux, and now it's my main rig. I only really boot the xp machine so the rest of the household can reach a printer, when necessary.