“Netbooks are a dead-end experiment in un-usability. Smartphones are the natural evolution that has already arrived.”— David Chartier on this. I don’t believe in netbooks, either. It’s logical to think that people like laptops to get ever smaller and ever cheaper, but there are practical limits to that. The mass market _really_ doesn’t like tiny keyboards or tiny screens, a lesson we learned a decade ago, so that puts a pretty hard cap on how small laptops can reasonably be and still appeal to most buyers. (The MacBook Air is a great example of doing it right, size-wise: full-size keyboard and screen, tiny everything else, 3.0 pounds.) Netbooks want to be your tiny cheap portable computer with no power or capacity to supplement your big desktop computer with tons of power and capacity. But increasingly, people are eschewing desktops and just using midrange laptops as their only computers. There’s very little real demand for tiny, ugly, underpowered desktop-Linux computers with crappy screens and crappy keyboards no matter how cheaply anyone’s able to produce them.
Other than cost I don’t see that much of a discrepancy between netbooks and the Air. Quality netbooks running a decent OS mainly Win7 are an awesome thing. They aren’t underpowered, have good screens, and on some even my monstrous hands can type comfortably. The only real power benchmark for netbooks is video. If it plays hulu then it’s reasonable. Cost is a large aspect of it too. The Lenovo S12 is $450 for an awesome machine, I love apple but would never see anything like that from them.
On the other hand, is the computer industry shooting itself in the foot. All indications are that netbooks garner anywhere from no profit to razor thin margins which could cause severe financial issues as they grow in popularity and a price expectation is set.
