Netbooks Are Losing Steam?

[tone007]

With the price of netbooks not dropping like the prices of laptops, it only makes sense there'd be more competition, for a couple hundred dollars more than the price of a netbook you can get a full-featured system.  Sony, who had generally been in the higher price range, have a few higher performance models under $1000 now.

Netbooks are still in the "buy it and throw it around" price range as far as computers go, I use mine as sort of a Swiss army computer, carry it around without a bag, triple booting OSes, and if it happens to get smashed I'll just grab one of the spares.

[tone007]

Netbook is just a buzz word for something that pretty much existed anyway since the late 90s.

IBM 240 series come to mind, as Does the later P2 based Libretto from Toshiba.

Difference is back then you paid a high premium for the small size, now they're the cheaper item, big difference from a buyer's perspective.

(a laptop with shared memory/integrated graphics IS useless)

Now you're just making things up.

[tone007]

Just don't try and do anything like run a game that a 100 quid second hand 2005 model Dell Latitude D810 with ATI X600 graphics can do on any 350 quid laptop of today.

I'm not much of a gamer, but I did a couple of months of WoW on a laptop with an Intel 945 chipset back in 2006 or so, and it ran nice and smooth with the quality settings turned up pretty high.  I'm sure games are more hardware intensive than they were then, but I imagine integrated graphics are more powerful as well.  Ideal? Probably not.  Usable? Most likely.
 

Hmmm and ALL laptops were expensive back in the late 90s and early to mid 00s. The price difference between an IBM Thinkpad 240/240x with it's 9" LCD TFT and a slightly higher spec P2 full sized 13" screened SXGA TFT laptop with CD/DVD playback was no more of a difference in percentage terms between them as it is today between full sized crap and netbook crap

Right, all were more expensive than they are now, but the "ultraportable" ones cost more than the usual laptop.  Right before the netbook boom, Toshiba put out a Libretto that was something close to $2000 when you could get a regular laptop with better performance for $1000.  Netbooks are cheap compared to anything but the lowest-end laptops.

[tone007]

Photoshop runs fine on my netbooks.  About the only thing I wouldn't want to try is video editing.

[tone007]

Why not? Is there some kind of limit on how powerful a computer may be before it can no longer be called a netbook?
The main features of a netbook is portability, battery life, and internet connectivity. Any computer sold for less than 300 USD, and being designed with that in mind could be classified as a netbook.

I'm betting if you put an i7 in a netbook, you'd lose the battery life aspect, and if you put a bigger battery in, you'd need a bigger case, so you'd lose the portability aspect.  Sounds kind of like a laptop to me.