6 ms·

Apple Killed the Netbook

14 points by joxie 14y ago

reidrac 14y ago
I'm honestly surprised that Charles Arthur's article is being referenced in so many places without taking into account that Arthur is well known for being an Apple fan (there are several examples in the tech section of the Guardian; ie. the Windows PC are dead because Apple is growing faster, but don't look at the market share!). I'm not saying the iPad didn't have a role in the netbook decline, but "Apple killed the netbook" sounds to me like it's a little bit excessive. May be it was the raise of smartphones and tablets, but not just from Apple. Signed: an habitual reader of the Guardian's tech section :)
- neya 14y ago
  Agreed. Just flagged the article. These people with unethical journalistic bias are only causing more confusion amongst the readers usually leading to an unwanted debate so they can benefit (=pageviews) out of it.
  - weiran 14y ago
    You flagged an article because you didn't agree with the author's opinion? I guess I should go flag half of the the Hacker News top posts.
    - neya 14y ago
      I said I flagged it because of the unethical nature of the article. Don't manipulate things as you see fit, please.
marmaduke 14y ago
I was pretty darn happy with my eee pc: lightweight, good battery life, durable, and replaceably cheap (for a student). Somehow the x220 I bought afterward, for speed and one more inch of screen, compromised all those qualities.
fpgeek 14y ago
One issue the article doesn't touch on is the various restrictions Microsoft and Intel put on netbooks (to protect their margins related to other PCs, I believe). I'd say those were at least a contributing factor (if not the underlying killer) because those restrictions made it much harder for netbooks to change as the competitive landscape did.
- crdoconnor 14y ago
  I'd say that was the killer full stop. I would dearly have loved to have kept on buying netbooks, but they're still at 2GB RAM, (mostly) one core and 1024x768 even 3-4 years on. Microsoft put that ceiling there, not Apple.
  - hollerith 14y ago
    That's a little misleading: the ceiling applied only to the discounted version of Windows. Any manufacturer who wanted to sell netbooks with better specs could have sprung for the full-price Windows license.
    - Shorel 14y ago
      What you suggest is not financially possible given the tight margins for netbooks, and MS knows this. They would essentially be paying their customers for each device and then losing money with each machine.
jpxxx 14y ago
The PC industry's shitty netbook lines killed the netbook. Apple was just standing there.
- spacestation 14y ago
  standing there indeed, with the smoking gun, the iPad.
- wtallis 14y ago
  Intel in particular had a lot to do with it. For all their talk, they really haven't accomplished much with their Atom line: it's got less than half the IPC of their mainstream architecture and has pretty low clock speeds, and it's been embarrassingly slow about moving to new lithography nodes. (The 22nm Atom has reportedly been delayed to 2014, when Intel's mainstream 22nm chips shipped spring 2012.) On the other hand, Intel refuses to make a sufficiently cheap version of their Core lineup, which is why ultrabooks are so much more expensive and yet most components are still pretty low-quality.
  - baq 14y ago
    intel likes money. if atoms have lower margins than bigger cpus, then intel will try to make people buy bigger cpus. simple.
Shank 14y ago
I wouldn't say it's "just Apple" or just a product by them. In every case of someone owning a netbook I've seen, it's just too difficult to use. Typing on a tiny keyboard is a nightmare, and running a fully fledged OS just makes the problem worse. Apple might have accelerated it, but the form factor was terrible, while the price exceeded that of a mid range laptop in several cases.
- wtallis 14y ago
  The keyboards weren't small enough to be completely unusable, but 1024x600 was obviously never going to be good enough. If we'd had today's LCD market back when the netbook fad started, they would have been much more usable machines.
dizzystar 14y ago
People were snapping up $200 to $300 netbooks because they were broke, thus it stands to reason that these people were holding out to pay north of $700 for a touch tablet with an incomplete OS you couldn't run two programs on simultaneously? What killed the netbook is simply that the price of a genuine laptop went down in price. Picking up a brand new 15" laptop for $400 was unheard of 2 years ago. Hell, I bought my i5 w/ 6 gig Ram for $550 brand new. That would have been the price of a mid-line netbook two years ago.
- stinos 14y ago
  seems legit. I'm not into the tablet market enough but are there small cheap tablets that you can hook up to a projector and use to present your powerpoints and documents? That's what most people I know having a notebook use it for: they don't want to drag around a laptop
- sterna 14y ago
  I bought a netbook because I wanted a computer that I could easily bring along while traveling because I went to a lot of meetings abroad at the time. I could easily have afforded a laptop but they were not nearly as portable at the time, so the MacBook Air style computers have also had a big impact on netbook sales for people like me.
- meric 14y ago
  Perhaps the price of laptops was forced lower in order to compete with tablet devices.
  - IheartApplesDix 14y ago
    Perhaps the opposite of that since laptops came first, by a bit.
- timerickson 14y ago
  I think the point you raise is valid, but the way you arrive to it is disingenuous. North of $700? The iPad starts at $500, and recently, the iPad Mini at $330. Granted the Mini is late in this timeline, but it stands to reason the price point is closer than you're making it out to be. Secondly, an "incomplete OS" is a fallacy. It's complete to the spec it was designed for. Yes, that means its not intended to be a fully-fledged desktop OS, but its not inherently incomplete, just focused. Thirdly, "running two programs simultaneously" – I'd wager that many netbook users (myself included) found the netbook so limiting and simple that it was only ever used for doing one thing at a time, such as reading email, browsing the web, listening to music or reading a book; all of which now accomplished by the iPad.
asveikau 14y ago
In some circles this isn't a popular sentiment, but rest in peace, netbook. Put a minimal Linux distro and a light X setup on it and you've got a very usable machine for ~$300 or less. I guess when my current one breaks I'll have to resort to Debian arm on an android tablet, or similar.
- hollerith 14y ago
  Or a Chromebook.
lifeguard 14y ago
MS killed the netbook not Apple. They did this by inducing OEMs to make more powerful (expensive) machines that would run XP. XP didn't work on the first eeepc, for example.
- hollerith 14y ago
  >XP didn't work on the first eeepc, for example. I always thought that XP would have run fine on the first eeepc and that Linux was chosen to keep the retail price down. XP became the most common OS on netbooks after Microsoft introduced a special netbook-only lower price for XP.
  - lifeguard 14y ago
    From wikipedia: "Newer models added the options of Microsoft Windows operating system, rotating media hard disk drives (HDD) and initially retailed for up to 500 euros."
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
wink 14y ago
What I find most confusing about this article that the author finds that netbooks went away for good. Since when choice is that bad? No one's forced to buy a netbook if he doesn't want to, right? I bought an eeePC 900A in late 2008 and it's travelled all over the world with me now, gone to several conferences and troubleshooting gigs at friends and relatives, and basically everywhere I didn't want to carry a 15" notebook (don't have anything between) Yes, it was a bit slow, but it's running a default debian install on a LUKS-encrypted 8GB SSD - what's not to love about it? I indeed mourn the downfall of the netbook, and if mine ever dies I'd be very much tempted to get a new one for ~250 EUR just before a larger trip. Edit: I have HTC Desire Z and a 7" ainol tablet, I like both - but for nearly everything I've ever used my netbook, I can't use them really. Only exception is writing blog posts on the road...
bunderbunder 14y ago
What killed the netbook is that nobody ever wanted to buy a second netbook.
gte910h 14y ago
To be fair, netbooks are pretty rough to use, especially for men (finger size on 80% keyboards). They always seemed transitional to me.
jinushaun 14y ago
Having owned a netbook, Apple didn't do anything. Netbooks killed themselves. They were really bad products and a worthless compromise anyway you measure it: cramped keyboards, unreliable track pads, processors too slow to watch YouTube videos, poor viewing angles and a screen so small that many websites don't display properly. Netbooks were a nice thought experiment, but the market was never there. $400 for a tiny poorly-made laptop just to check Facebook, or $600 for a decently-made full-size laptop?

14 points by joxie 14y ago

I'm honestly surprised that Charles Arthur's article is being referenced in so many places without taking into account that Arthur is well known for being an Apple fan (there are several examples in the tech section of the Guardian; ie. the Windows PC are dead because Apple is growing faster, but don't look at the market share!). I'm not saying the iPad didn't have a role in the netbook decline, but "Apple killed the netbook" sounds to me like it's a little bit excessive. May be it was the raise of smartphones and tablets, but not just from Apple. Signed: an habitual reader of the Guardian's tech section :)

neya 14y ago
Agreed. Just flagged the article. These people with unethical journalistic bias are only causing more confusion amongst the readers usually leading to an unwanted debate so they can benefit (=pageviews) out of it.
- weiran 14y ago
  You flagged an article because you didn't agree with the author's opinion? I guess I should go flag half of the the Hacker News top posts.
  - neya 14y ago
    I said I flagged it because of the unethical nature of the article. Don't manipulate things as you see fit, please.

marmaduke 14y ago

I was pretty darn happy with my eee pc: lightweight, good battery life, durable, and replaceably cheap (for a student). Somehow the x220 I bought afterward, for speed and one more inch of screen, compromised all those qualities.

fpgeek 14y ago

One issue the article doesn't touch on is the various restrictions Microsoft and Intel put on netbooks (to protect their margins related to other PCs, I believe). I'd say those were at least a contributing factor (if not the underlying killer) because those restrictions made it much harder for netbooks to change as the competitive landscape did.

crdoconnor 14y ago
I'd say that was the killer full stop. I would dearly have loved to have kept on buying netbooks, but they're still at 2GB RAM, (mostly) one core and 1024x768 even 3-4 years on. Microsoft put that ceiling there, not Apple.
- hollerith 14y ago
  That's a little misleading: the ceiling applied only to the discounted version of Windows. Any manufacturer who wanted to sell netbooks with better specs could have sprung for the full-price Windows license.
  - Shorel 14y ago
    What you suggest is not financially possible given the tight margins for netbooks, and MS knows this. They would essentially be paying their customers for each device and then losing money with each machine.

jpxxx 14y ago

The PC industry's shitty netbook lines killed the netbook. Apple was just standing there.

spacestation 14y ago
standing there indeed, with the smoking gun, the iPad.
wtallis 14y ago
Intel in particular had a lot to do with it. For all their talk, they really haven't accomplished much with their Atom line: it's got less than half the IPC of their mainstream architecture and has pretty low clock speeds, and it's been embarrassingly slow about moving to new lithography nodes. (The 22nm Atom has reportedly been delayed to 2014, when Intel's mainstream 22nm chips shipped spring 2012.) On the other hand, Intel refuses to make a sufficiently cheap version of their Core lineup, which is why ultrabooks are so much more expensive and yet most components are still pretty low-quality.
- baq 14y ago
  intel likes money. if atoms have lower margins than bigger cpus, then intel will try to make people buy bigger cpus. simple.

Shank 14y ago

I wouldn't say it's "just Apple" or just a product by them. In every case of someone owning a netbook I've seen, it's just too difficult to use. Typing on a tiny keyboard is a nightmare, and running a fully fledged OS just makes the problem worse. Apple might have accelerated it, but the form factor was terrible, while the price exceeded that of a mid range laptop in several cases.

wtallis 14y ago
The keyboards weren't small enough to be completely unusable, but 1024x600 was obviously never going to be good enough. If we'd had today's LCD market back when the netbook fad started, they would have been much more usable machines.

dizzystar 14y ago

People were snapping up $200 to $300 netbooks because they were broke, thus it stands to reason that these people were holding out to pay north of $700 for a touch tablet with an incomplete OS you couldn't run two programs on simultaneously? What killed the netbook is simply that the price of a genuine laptop went down in price. Picking up a brand new 15" laptop for $400 was unheard of 2 years ago. Hell, I bought my i5 w/ 6 gig Ram for $550 brand new. That would have been the price of a mid-line netbook two years ago.

stinos 14y ago
seems legit. I'm not into the tablet market enough but are there small cheap tablets that you can hook up to a projector and use to present your powerpoints and documents? That's what most people I know having a notebook use it for: they don't want to drag around a laptop
sterna 14y ago
I bought a netbook because I wanted a computer that I could easily bring along while traveling because I went to a lot of meetings abroad at the time. I could easily have afforded a laptop but they were not nearly as portable at the time, so the MacBook Air style computers have also had a big impact on netbook sales for people like me.
meric 14y ago
Perhaps the price of laptops was forced lower in order to compete with tablet devices.
- IheartApplesDix 14y ago
  Perhaps the opposite of that since laptops came first, by a bit.
timerickson 14y ago
I think the point you raise is valid, but the way you arrive to it is disingenuous. North of $700? The iPad starts at $500, and recently, the iPad Mini at $330. Granted the Mini is late in this timeline, but it stands to reason the price point is closer than you're making it out to be. Secondly, an "incomplete OS" is a fallacy. It's complete to the spec it was designed for. Yes, that means its not intended to be a fully-fledged desktop OS, but its not inherently incomplete, just focused. Thirdly, "running two programs simultaneously" – I'd wager that many netbook users (myself included) found the netbook so limiting and simple that it was only ever used for doing one thing at a time, such as reading email, browsing the web, listening to music or reading a book; all of which now accomplished by the iPad.

asveikau 14y ago

In some circles this isn't a popular sentiment, but rest in peace, netbook. Put a minimal Linux distro and a light X setup on it and you've got a very usable machine for ~$300 or less. I guess when my current one breaks I'll have to resort to Debian arm on an android tablet, or similar.

hollerith 14y ago
Or a Chromebook.

lifeguard 14y ago

MS killed the netbook not Apple. They did this by inducing OEMs to make more powerful (expensive) machines that would run XP. XP didn't work on the first eeepc, for example.

hollerith 14y ago
>XP didn't work on the first eeepc, for example. I always thought that XP would have run fine on the first eeepc and that Linux was chosen to keep the retail price down. XP became the most common OS on netbooks after Microsoft introduced a special netbook-only lower price for XP.
- lifeguard 14y ago
  From wikipedia: "Newer models added the options of Microsoft Windows operating system, rotating media hard disk drives (HDD) and initially retailed for up to 500 euros."
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

wink 14y ago

What I find most confusing about this article that the author finds that netbooks went away for good. Since when choice is that bad? No one's forced to buy a netbook if he doesn't want to, right? I bought an eeePC 900A in late 2008 and it's travelled all over the world with me now, gone to several conferences and troubleshooting gigs at friends and relatives, and basically everywhere I didn't want to carry a 15" notebook (don't have anything between) Yes, it was a bit slow, but it's running a default debian install on a LUKS-encrypted 8GB SSD - what's not to love about it? I indeed mourn the downfall of the netbook, and if mine ever dies I'd be very much tempted to get a new one for ~250 EUR just before a larger trip. Edit: I have HTC Desire Z and a 7" ainol tablet, I like both - but for nearly everything I've ever used my netbook, I can't use them really. Only exception is writing blog posts on the road...

bunderbunder 14y ago

What killed the netbook is that nobody ever wanted to buy a second netbook.

gte910h 14y ago

To be fair, netbooks are pretty rough to use, especially for men (finger size on 80% keyboards). They always seemed transitional to me.

jinushaun 14y ago

Having owned a netbook, Apple didn't do anything. Netbooks killed themselves. They were really bad products and a worthless compromise anyway you measure it: cramped keyboards, unreliable track pads, processors too slow to watch YouTube videos, poor viewing angles and a screen so small that many websites don't display properly. Netbooks were a nice thought experiment, but the market was never there. $400 for a tiny poorly-made laptop just to check Facebook, or $600 for a decently-made full-size laptop?