Netbooks Are Great Sellers
Netbooks are the latest piece of hardware to target the geek scene. Every manufacturer worth its salt is rushing to get their version of the netbook on the market. I am going to be camped on this thing for four hours.’ Netbooks are fine on a plane for an hour but not for four hours. Remember the original argument between the notebook and the desktop? Netbooks are petite and sweet and they look more like a toy than like a real computer. But they are real and their processing power is enough for browsing the Web, listening to music, reading books, running various applications.
Netbooks are the newest members of the computer class. They are ultra mobile computers that being used for light tasks like web surfing but are increasingly being used for more tasking tasks. The upshot is that netbooks are great as cheap, simple and small computers for performing basic tasks—especially if the pre-installed software does what you want it to. They will never satisfy power users who want to edit video and play elaborate games, but they are not meant to. Whether netbooks are secondary purchasers or replacement purchasers is a big topic for coputer manufacturers. If they are secondary purchasers then they are nice extra business.
NetBooks are not meant to replace desktops and laptops. I own both a desktop I use at my office, and a 15.4″ laptop I use at home. Stu Pann, VP of Marketing and Sales is quoted saying netbooks are just “fine for an hour”, but suggests they have no application outside of casual computing. Funny, I’ve been using my Wind and Eee since early ‘08 every single day. Netbooks are a double-edged sword for Microsoft , as Microsoft’s earnings report on January 22 made clear. Without revenues from netbooks, Microsoft’s Client revenues would undoubtedly would have been a lot worse than they were.
Netbooks are mobile computers with screens ranging from 5 inches to 10 inches. Originally intended principally for the education market, they typically run Linux or Windows XP and need to connect to the Internet for heavy computing tasks. Netbooks are not comfortable to use, have tiny screens, underpowered processors, and should not be considered a replacement for any full-power notebook/laptop computer, Apple or not. Mine, while it fits wonderfully, on the seatback tray in front of me while on the plane, has barely enough oomph to play video fullscreen. Stephen warned: “$399 netbooks aren’t going to be a net-net for anyone.”.They will cannibalize sales of larger notebooks, whose average selling prices would decline in response. Stephen would be happier with mininotebooks “selling for $449 or, better, $499.”.
Netbooks are all the rage at the moment, with Asus predicting that it will sell 5 million of its Asus Eee PC netbooks by the end of this year. However, one of the tricky aspects of netbooks is that they have much more limited hardware resources than larger, traditional notebooks. This “dumbing down” may be predicated on the assumption that netbooks are for viewing whilst laptops are for doing . There is probably some truth in that, though it will not deter free software veterans from tinkering with their machines to do things never intended by the vendors. More power-conscious ARM-based netbooks are coming in 2009 with chips that will use no more than one watt of power.