Netbooks Are Losing Steam?

[the_leander]

I see my 12" iBook G4 1.33 ghz as my netbook,

You can see it any way you want, it doesn't change the fact that it's no more a netbook then an IBM Thinkpad 390XD.

Netbooks have a 10ins screen or less.

 40Gb (More than most SSDs)

SSDs come in 256GB models and have been available at 128Mb capacities for a while.

If you're talking about any but the earliest of the second Gen (basically Atom based variants of the EeePC onwards) Netbooks, many of them come with 1.8ins hard drives of far greater capacity then your ibooks hard drive.

is a better buy than what I see as a castrated laptop, an underpowered CPU and low RAM, no optical drive.

Underpowered? It's a satellite system, it's not designed for being a full blown computer, it's for light use on a limited number of things - light browsing, some typing, watching the odd film on... You're not going to be producing a magnum opus or doing 3d rendering on one...

I can buy an iBook refurbished w/ Tiger or Leopard for $200

I can buy a EEEPC for around the same, only mine comes with a two year warranty.

like my own or a new netbook, I'll choose the iBook, even if its an ARM because of the proven reliability of the one I have. Thats my opinion, and i find it pretty sound

You own a notebook, and that's great, I'm truly glad you're happy with it. And yes, it is a little disappointing to see that netbook makers are trying to turn the paradigm of small, cheap computers into a mini luxury item but there you go, older models are still plentiful and in reality offer just about everything the latest models do in terms of features for comfortably around the £200 mark.

Trying to compare a netbook to a full blown notebook is sheer folly. It's not comparing like for like.

[the_leander]

Back on topic, netbooks are losing steam because they gradually got bigger, more powerful and more expensive. They are trying to take on laptops but cant because the value just isn't there any more.

That's just it though, the latest EEEPC 1005PE is no more powerful then a 90x series system. They all run a variant of the  1.6Ghz Atom cpu and offer virtually no additional performance over their predecessors.

In fact the only netbooks that do offer anything extra are ones that come with the Nvidia ION chipset and for those you're well into reasonable quality notebook price territory.

Essentially you're paying for a 3 year old system in a new shell. I think people have pretty much worked this out. That they're charging some pretty outrageous prices for the privilege...

[the_leander]

£269 is outrageous?

Fixed that for you. And yes, just shy of £300 for a 3 year old piece of kit that when it came out initially cost £250 is an obscenity.

[the_leander]

Let me fix that back for you and correct myself...$249[/url] at newegg.

US prices, now tell me how much that'd cost with import tax and VAT. Oh and £20 or so for a replacement charger.

Not living in the US, that price is not available to me without risking a visit from Customs.

[the_leander]

The problem with Notebooks is heat

Actually of all the things netbooks commonly suffer from (thin casings on them that allow too much flex which in turn damages the motherboards, for instance) heat related issues rank fairly low.

not being able to expand or change your system easily

Same goes for laptops. But here's the thing: You don't buy one of these things for upgradability. You buy them for portability and price.

and one of the things I've researched about them is they don't last as long as desktop computers.  

You get what you pay for. You buy an el cheapo desktop and you're tempting fate every bit as much as with a poor quality netbook. It also has to be said that netbooks are subject to stresses that a desktop system rarely, if ever encounters in its service life.

The original netbook brief of small cheap computing meant that they were all but disposable, if you dropped them, meh who cares.

What I've also discovered through research is that most netbook users use them at home.

Care to provide citation for this?

So why didn't they just get a laptop or desktop?

Size, cost and what they intend to run on it. You don't need some C2D 17ins laptop if all you want is something to browse the net occasionally.

I'm not excited with Windows and I'm tired of the system registry which is why I want Linux which isn't supposed to have one.

I've got some very bad news for you. Just about every modern OS that runs on a variety of different hardware platforms has some form of database to help with driver config. MacOS, Linux, Windows, Solaris, BSD, hell even BeOS.