I was wandering through Staples yesterday and saw a ton of tablet PCs, but no netbooks on display. Curious I inquired and was told they no longer carry netbooks. They carry one 11 inch portable, but at $ 600 and with an i3 CPU it’s not really a classic inexpensive netbook.
Is the classic cheap netbook dead or dying?
I love mine.
Tablets have pretty much killed the netbook market, largely by being sexier. We bought a netbook for my wife this past Mother’s Day though and she loves it. For the price, it’s considerably more powerful and versatile. It just doesn’t have a touch screen and easy-load apps.
I absolutely love mine but I’d probably replace it with a tablet.
Since I have an iPad I replaced my 10" netbook with a 13" notebook. I don’t know why they’d be dead, though…tablets simply don’t have the functionality or versatility of a PC, no matter how tiny. Even with a bluetooth keyboard, I can’t describe how sucky I find doing actual “work” on my iPad.
I’m actually not a huge fan of doing PowerPoint, Excel or any real writing work on my netbook, but I got one for the portability factor. Earlier this year I had a co-op internship at a company that made the team I was on travel all over the US to meet with their clients, and I found it far too cumbersome to drag my regular laptop around for presentations, note taking and the like. So I’d do most of the work on my regular laptops, but take the netbook for travel. It’s also nice that I can just drop it in my nice (large) purse and be on my way to school.
But at the end of the project one of 2 of my teammates got iPad 2s. We used them for the final presentation to our employers and I thought they were so handy in terms of presentation delivery. Also, I spent my summer internship in healthcare marketing, and I know our salesforce are dying to get their hands on tablet devices. Having used them myself for a similar purpose I can understand why. That said, I wasn’t the one who was making last minute changes to the presentation on the tablet, so I can’t speak to whether it’s easy to work on them or not. I figure by the time I buy one, it will be. But I have 2 new laptops and a brand new netbook (long story as to why I own a bajillion computers right now) and I really can’t justify adding a tablet to the mix, even though I’m dying to get one so I can make all my coursepacks into PDF format and do my school reading on a tablet (still baffled as to why the school won’t give us some form of locked PDF instead of printouts). If I can get my grubbing paws on a 99.99 HP Touchpad I’d probably buy it. I’m not wedded to the iPad brand, I’m just tired of breaking my back lugging around heavy computers and stuff I’m supposed to be reading.
This is it for me - I’m too old to be lugging law books and my massive old laptop. But I need to do work and write, so I got an 11in Macbook Air (and I run Windows in Parallels because I am addicted to OneNote.) Frankly I would have prefered a Windows version but the Air-style/size ones are far too expensive.
I, too, would want to find an excuse to get a tablet for reading, but none of my books so far has had a PDF version. :mad:
But my Air has literally saved me from shoulder surgery. I wouldn’t have gotten a regular netbook, even those are too bulky and heavy.
I was going to buy an 11 inch air, but the dirty hippy at the Mac Store said it didn’t have enough space for a windows partition, so I got a Vaio instead. How has that been working for you?
Also, as part of my recent laptop shopping experience, I went to about 7 or 8 big box stores to compare computers, and I got to be honest, the laptop selection at Staples was pretty shitty. I’m not sure I’d use that as the yardstick of the netbook’s success or failure!
The MacStoreDirtyHippie™ lied.
Although actually, I run Win7 in Parallells, and it works wonderfully. I got the most souped up version of the 11’’ Air with the biggest HD though. I still have 100 gigs left over, but I don’t actually store much on the HD - I use a lot of Dropbox action, cause I’m scared of losing my data with exams in just over a week. Runs like a dream. The worst thing that happens is when I go from the Win desktop to the Mac one, my iTunes (which may or may not be running on either desktop) stops playing for literally 1-2 seconds. That’s it.
I don’t do Bootcamp, but I suspect since I’ve got a full Win7 install on, it’d be fine.
I still don’t see tablets in any of the local stores. I see the 7" ones that are essentially just large phones, but they are not in any way designed to take the place of a netbook.
Now, I do think that tablets will replace the netbook, but I don’t think it’s happened yet. (And it’s definitely not going to happen because of the iPad. There will either be a feature scramble, or iPad will remain only a tablet, and not a portable computing device.)
I love mine. Tablets are for grandmas and Apple fanboys.
Me too. How the heck are you really supposed to type on a tablet?
I can sit on the couch with it on my lap and blaze away on an honest to god keyboard. Yet it’s not heavy at all and easy to take anywhere. Sure, a tablet is lighter, but other than that, IMHO, they offer absolutely nothing over a netbook.
Sexier. Having a tablet says you are the wave of the future! You have tip calculator apps and Angry Birds and… you know… a screen you can touch instead of a keyboard!
I’ll revise my earlier comments. If you ask Google if netbooks are dead, you get all sorts of articles predicting their demise starting in 2009. More recent articles have had a push-back slant to them, saying how they’re still a viable option. When I researched and bought my wife’s, I noticed places having price reductions on them and read articles about how production was slowing or companies were discontinuing lines to get into tablets but I think it’s too early to write the obituary.
A $250 netbook is more powerful and versatile than your $500 tablets; you just have to deal with owning a mini-laptop and not a touch slate. I’ll also note that many of the “Netbooks are dead” articles come from tech blogs and I think a lot of those guys have unrealistic views of what the average customer wants from their devices. It’s hard to be “underpowered” for e-mail, web browsing, Facebook, Flash games and watching Hulu with the occasional word processing or spreadsheet task thrown in.
netbooks might have done better if they didn’t absolutely suck at the thing that gave them their name. Hint: if you’re going to market something as ideal for internet use, don’t saddle it with a CPU that chokes on even light javascript and flash.
We haven’t had that problem but maybe it was more common to the first wave of netbooks.
I love mine too, although I probably will upgrade soon, the battery life is shockingly shit.
When I go to a meeting with a tablet, it’s like going with a notebook – a real notebook, with paper, calendar sheets, like an old-fashioned dayrunner. When I go with a laptop, it’s like going with a computer. If I type on the computer to take notes, it’s avoiding the meeting. With a stylus on my iPad, it’s just being attentive.
Netbooks aren’t dead, there is just so little profit margin that many brick-and-mortar stores don’t want to stock them (though Target does).
I bought this Acer Aspire netbook a couple of months ago…and love it to death. Size of a sheet of paper, about 3 lbs, 11.6" display @ full 720p - the extra 1.5" display and the full-size keyboard makes all the difference for me, usability-wise. No, it’s not a speed demon, but paired with a dedicated ATI GPU, it’s pretty spritely - crushes the 500-series Atoms.
In a pinch I even used it to do some page layout work a week ago at a conference and it held it’s own. Battery life is excellent - I’ve gone over 6 hours of continuous moderate use (video in a window while surfing) without draining it.
And the price (~$295 from Amazon) is tough to beat (though I bumped the RAM up to 4Gb from 2 for ~$30); my local Target had it on sale for $249 less than a month ago.
It’s probably a function of being in academia, but most meetings I go to roughly half the attendees have laptops out and running (with another ~10% using tablets).
If a meeting is entirely lacking in notebooks, it’s almost guaranteed to be a “high-level” meeting (Deans and up) - and then they almost all have their voluminous dayplanners out… 