I adore my netbook. It’s powerful enough to run Hulu well, and it’s not bad at lightweight gaming. I can write well on it and it pretty much just does everything I need while being smaller and more portable than a laptop. The only problem is the fan’s unbalanced and causes an insane amount of noise, and I haven’t had time to get it sent in for repair yet.
Huh?
My Asus Eee 1005 is two years old, so it doesn’t have the latest and greatest netbook processor, but it handles javascript and flash just fine. The only time it ever slows down during regular internet, email, and word processing use is when i leave a whole bunch of tabs open in Firefox, and i blame Firefox for that (with its memory leak) as much as the netbook.
That doesn’t surprise me at all, they’ll probably be late on the rent-a-textbook game. And I sympathize because they WERE enormous and awful to lug around. But only one of my textbooks was available this year in PDF format, as most of the profs for business school make us use coursepacks. However, quite a bit of the materials are PDFs on the intranet system and I’d love to be able to access them on a tablet.
We never had this game going at my law school, but a classmate of mine who went to Hastings told me that the trend at her school was to have their casebooks “chopped” at a Kinkos and then rebound into smaller bound pieces, so they’d only have to carry the pieces to school. They’d decided where to chop them by how the professor set up the syllabus.
I suspect Windows Starter Edition being on them is a significant factor in their decline. When I was buying laptops for my kids, I considered netbooks, but every one had Windows Starter Edition*. I ended up getting them 14 inch laptops with the full 64 bit Windows.
*Maybe there were high priced ones with standard Windows, I don’t know.
Yeah, that was annoying. For some reason, windows 7 starter desktop had less…space…than windows XP? It seems like the same 10" screen holds less data. Microsoft is apparently gearing Windows 8 towards the tablet market, so it looks like they’re banking on tablets being the future…
I wouldn’t be surprised if netbooks get a renewed life because of the tablets. I envision netbooks becoming the mainframe behind the tablet and pushing the tablet ever farther into the user-interface realm. The tablet caught on fast in the business world and is showing it’s worth and versatility as a portal device.
There’s no reason it has to be tablet or netbook. The Asus EEE Transformer is both, and rocks.
They will be totally late - and later here. I’m in Australia and we’re way behind trends in publishing of academic books, because we’re frankly a tiny market for them. My husband just did his MBA and he got coursepacks and PDF books and all sorts of goodies, but me? Feh, I’m lucky to have a paper cover. Suppose that if you’re laying out that kind of cash for an MBA (which I remember you are taking now) then you get goodies. 
Plus, how different can business theory be between to modernised, western nations? Most of his textbooks/PDFs were American anyway.
We’re lucky to get powerpoint notes, to be honest. I have some very old profs who just talk. I take notes on the Macbook straight into Onenote. I don’t bring textbooks to class so I can get away with just my Air, which is great. I tried my husband’s tablet (he’s got a Galaxy 10.1) with a stylus, but it just didn’t cut it. I can type faster than I write anyway.
I would have both a tablet and a netbook, to be honest, if my lawbooks came in PDF. Two screens are handy. Plus, the upside to going to uni as an adult is the lack of grinding poverty. 
I know…this is exactly why I want a tablet…so I can look at the reading while I’m doing shit on the computer. Right now toggling between the PDF and Powerpoint is irritating…so I print stuff out.
Have no idea if law schools are actually on an intranet with PDF handout notes or the like even over here. I was in law school from 2002-2005 and they were quite smug about the fact that they even gave us the opp to take the finals on the computer! Otherwise my life was pretty much like yours…hauling computer to every class to write down as much as I could. And you’re right, business school is a totally different deal and I don’t think I’ve even handed anything in on paper since I got there…they just let us email in by the deadline and do the printing themselves. Almost everything is distributed through an intranet system (problem sets, quizzes etc.)…each prof sets up his/her own class page and distributes everything through there. Honestly, I feel a bit babied through it all, sometimes but I’m enjoying it since I feel I’ve earned the right to be academically pampered and have branded snuggies thrown at my head after the hell of going to law school in the wake of the dot com bust (not as bad to get internships as it probably is now, but was pretty grim for a while).
We still take paper/pencil tests, but bring in the laptops because it’s easier to do the calculations in Excel.
And you’re right…I’m paying an unbelievable amount of money for 2 year’s worth of “education” (it feels more like an extended party with a veneer of math). But right now it’s like why do I care to save $500? Who the hell am I kidding? If I don’t have a tablet by the end of September I’ll be surprised.
I love my netbook, and I don’t want a tablet. I’ve tried the iPad (my sister in law has one) and I didn’t like it. It seemed gimmicky and toy-like to me.
Other people like them, fine, I prefer my netbook. It’s dual boot Windows/Ubuntu, though I use Ubuntu almost exclusively, the Windows partition is there mainly to run a few programs that have no Linux alternative.
Netbook sales have leveled out a bit, but they’re still going strong. The newest generation of netbook processors, either the AMD E-350 or, on some models, the core i3, are much, MUCH better than the Atom processors. Real dual cores, not fake ones, better power management, etc…
You want a laptop form-factor that’s dead/dying? Try ‘ultra-portable,’ ie, the 12-14" screen range. They end up being more expensive than a 15" laptop, even if they have worse specs! It’s a combo of not being big sellers (people either want netbook for a small laptop, or a full-sized one,) and having to cram more hardware than a netbook into not that much bigger a space.
I’m in the market for a 13.3-14" laptop, because I have a 17" now but it’s a pain in the neck, literally, to haul around. Between it, the charger, a portable HD, and portable mouse, it’s almost ten pounds. I hate even the larger (11.6") netbook screens…too damn small to get anything done on!
I’d love a 13.3" laptop, under 4 pounds, with great battery life…and what luck, there is one I’ve been eying a while, (the Toshiba Portege R835-P56X) But it’s over $900! (I’m kicking myself for not getting it when it was on sale for just over $700.)
My Sony Vaio S series is13.3", and I’m in the same boat. It was $999. :smack:
But apparently there’s deep rebates from the manufacturer, so now would be the time to pounce on those!
The problem is people keep trying to use netbooks as PCs which they are not. And computer makers don’t want to make netbooks upgradeable as they’d rather sell you the laptop.
They aren’t even good for things like digital TV as over the air reception is so tricky with digital TV unless you have a huge antenna.
I hope not. I have a HP DM1Z and I love it to death. I specifically chose this computer because it has what AMD is calling ‘Fusion’: a dual-core CPU and an honest to goodness GPU all on one chip. I love having a tiny computer that will also play the latest videogames when I’m on the road. And at $400, it’s pretty hard to beat!
I hear this but this wasn’t my experience. My Toshiba NB-100 lasted me 3.5 years. It was my default computer. I wrote my master’s thesis on it, played Age of Empires II (with a no-CD patch and a USB optical drive to install it), and had a full office sweet, and a browser with Flash and Java and Silverlight. Unless you’re a graphics designer or video editor or gamer, I fail to see what more my netbook needed to be qualified as a “PC!”
I have a netbook that I use for study while I’m out of the house. Much of my study takes advantage of the fact that many of the books for my research (Latin) are available free in electronic form, usually PDF. A full laptop was always too much freight for me to schlep around, at too high a price. The netbook was perfect, except that it was still a bit awkward to use PDFs, just as they are on my home desktop gaming machine.
So, we got a Kindle. Well, I’m sure if your main interest is in reading books in Kindle-friendly text only, the Kindle is awesome. It is pretty neat. But it’s even worse than the PC for handling PDFs. It’s awkward to turn pages, horrible to search, often rendered unreadable automatically but a major pain in the ass to resize. I’ve been hoping a tab would do what the Kindle apparently can’t.
Well, I recently upgraded to an Android phone. So far, it seems to do what I hope a tablet would be able to do, only smaller. PDFs are readable, scrollable, resizable and generally a pleasure to work with. It doesn’t replace my netbook, which can run software not yet ported to the Android platform and has a full if somewhat cramped keyboard. Also, the PC can be run with a Maiori keyboard, not apparently available from the alternate keyboards for the Android, but which is useful for entering the Macrons used for Latin pronunciation. My only quandry is now whether it would be best to have a tab to use next to my netbook, or just use the tab with a keyboard add-on and do business with applications at home. So far, it seems to me I’d be better off with both.
That’s why tablets are so quickly eroding the netbook’s sales. You can do all those things perfectly well on a tablet, and it’s generally thinner and lighter than a netbook (not to mention sexier, and for many people more intuitive to use). I don’t think netbooks are going to die completely, but I do think they’ll become specialty items, used by people who want to do processor-intensive stuff like serious photo editing while on the road.