For a hot minute, I had a 9-inch screen Dell laptop that could barely run Windows 7.
These small form factor PCs were pretty cool at the time, I remember loving the little thing.
A good stepping stone product, but netbooks weren’t destined to last long. Beyond the rosie tint of nostalgia, it was a pretty impractical device. Good enough display for DVD video, but no dvd drive or enough onboard storage to handle a selection of movies (at an acceptable encoding for the time, at least). Big enough to require a flat surface or a lap to type on but not powerful enough to justify it, and a very cramped typing surface at that.
Eventually they got replaced by tablets/convertibles, large phones, and ultrabooks. And all much better platforms in all ways, IMO.
I think you’re missing the key thing that netbooks did. Specifically: new, cheap, low power, and mobile cheap computing.
It didn’t matter how underpowered it was. Prior to the original netbook, the ASUS EEE 7", the alternative cheapest new computer you could buy was $600-$700. There was second hand computers cheaper, but they were a grab bag of reliability or results of abuse from the previous unknown owner.
These days that same niche is filled with $100 smartphones and $25 SoC comptuers like Raspberry Pi, but back then the EEE was a game changer for buying a computer, any computer, new for cheap.
Many of those other devices you mentioned had a market because the cheap netbook proved the market existed and was under served.
I was writing up a pretty similar comment at the same time… I totally agree here.
I’d say they were more killed by Chromebooks than anything else. They were both cheap, generally small, and fulfilled approximately the same use cases. Chromebooks basically just did what ASUS was trying to do but better, and with more choices in models.
The one thing is finding 7 inch Chromebooks was harder, they landed more around 10 or 11 so they were more after the larger EEEs, but IMO that was what killed them.
I’d agree with most of this, but I don’t think I’d argue they were ever replaced by anything else, just that the use case is too narrow.
Tablets are generally larger, have flappy keyboards if keyboards at all, are way more expensive, don’t have a built in mouse and often don’t support mice well, and they run a mobile OS, not a desktop OS. They are very different products solving very different problems. If you argue netbooks were just for playing movies, sure, but that’s not how I viewed them at all, especially since there were portable DVD players in the same form factor available for many years before netbooks existed. If that was the use case, there’d be no reason to run windows or have a keyboard.
I don’t see how they replace a large phone at all - a large phone is a much smaller screen and fits in your pocket. And makes calls. And is a touch screen. And has mobile internet access. They’re no where near the same thing.
Ultra books I think is the closest “replacement” here, but I’d argue it’s more of an evolution and/or a hybridization with a regular laptop.
I’d actually argue Chromebooks were the killer here. They still take notes well, are portable, cheap, have first party mouse support, are generally smaller and lighter weight, and are more type-able than both netbooks and tablets.
I think we only liked them as enthusiasts, but for the general public (say a student) they were very bad because being cheap meant they had crappy hardware just like modern Chromebooks. In fact, I’ve been interested in having a Chromebook lately that could run Android apps, but quickly realized a good one is as expensive as a good laptop in Brazil.
Lol, Dell had a tiny laptop in the late 90’s,was pretty slick. External CD and floppy. Ran NT4 great, and Win2k pretty well from what I recall.
HP had their “book” series then (850/650?), with a pop-out mouse. LOVED that thing. Ran 95, I think. Two PCCARD hot swap bays, double stack, so you could run 2 hard drives.
I was the build engineer that assembled the OS for these things between 2008-2010. It was a Debian based Linux distro with a custom built desktop and other custom built software, and it my memory serves my right, it was using the IceWM window manager.
That was my first real experience with Linux!
My little brother bought one open box from Best Buy. Somehow it didn’t have keyboard or trackpad drivers? Not even external usb would work.
Ended up putting Ubuntu on it for him I believe. Fun learning experience.
Yeah! When I joined the team, the build system was basically a bunch of Bash scripts duct taped together so to speak. It would fail all the time and everyone was unhappy. Devs couldn’t get a solid image, nor could the QA team have a product that they were sure they could reproduce. The build team all quit out of frustration because everyone was blaming them all the time for delays and it wasn’t even their fault because they didn’t write the scripts.
Some intern started another script but left early in his project. He didn’t transfer anything to anyone and we basically had to take out his hard drive to connect it to my system to extract his scripts because he didn’t bother to give anyone the password to his machine.
I still had to redo everything from scratch because his scripts somehow only worked on his system and were not portable.
Over the course of one year, I rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up. And in the end, it was a mix of Python, Bash, Perl and it was using chroot jails and Qemu as a containerization system before Docker even existed. In the end, I could build a Linux distribution with any suite of software for multiple architecture using a simple config file. I had a master system that acted as a monitor and a load balancer that would delegate the builds to whatever machine or container was available and give me real time information on the progress of each build.
Then the company went bankrupt.
I was going to say that sounds like quite the elegant setup you ended up with, and in a pre docker world? Straight up crazy in my eyes. Really puts into perspective how I take all the tolling around containerization for granted nowadays.
In college, I had an Eee netbook and loved the thing. It was all I could afford for a computer at the time. I still love small computers.
I wish these would come back. I loooove tiny PCs, and use the smallest everything I can get almost everywhere. Small phones, Small cars, Small computers.
The GPD Win has everything I want, but I can’t afford the $1400 they want for the 10". I miss these being available for the $100-$200 mark.
Wish the 11" was more prevelant. 11" with a decent camera, battery, fanless, and light weight would be amazing device
Suspect ARM based too
Tablets took the place of these in the market place. They just don’t have (or need) the attached keyboards anymore.
If you want an 11” ARM netbook, just get a Galaxy Tab and a Bluetooth keyboard stand.
Did you check out the HP Stream 11"?
Fanless, descent battery, camera, light and small. Best feature: Full size keyboard with a mostly standard layout and sd card slot. The display is a little weak but good enough for one person usage. I would not use it with Windows 11 (tried and it was painfully slow), but running Fedora Linux I can use it mostly like my desktop machine.
(Typing on this machine right now. ;-))
