If you don’t follow tech news you may have not heard of netbooks yet unless of course you watch QVC who was selling one as a special value the other day. In a nutshell netbooks are small form factor mini-computers bigger then a smart phone but smaller than a regular laptop. For the most part they have single core processors, limited RAM, and not all that much hard drive space. The current models run either Windows XP or Linux.
What interests me with netbooks is it’s really the first time that computers have been put onto the sales floor that don’t sell based on power. Since the PC has been in production tech-savvy people have bought on raw power of course price was always a factor so geeks would always buy a computer that they felt had the most bang for the buck. Historically laptops are more expensive than desktops. For most users laptops have more stringent requirements than a desktop. They must be portable enough to not weigh down users when traveling yet powerful enough to run Windows and productivity apps. Couple those requirements with the battery life and you get great technology that suffers on based portability. Laptop processors are almost always lower powered then desktop processors. With desktops you don’t care much about size and for the geeks among us desktops are all about raw power and expandability.
Enter netbooks these are small, mini computers if you will without a whole lot of processing, memory, or storage space that pro port to do all that most users want to do: Email, Browse the web, and instant message. On the “computing scale” netbooks fit somewhere between smart phones and laptops. Sure netbooks can run the latest MS Office but you probably wouldn’t want to wait for it to load or deal with delays whilst working with documents but they do serve a great purpose which is letting users do lightweight work with a lightweight machine no muss no fuss.
When I look at the specs of a higher end netbooks I chuckle because I launched and managed some of my best websites with a computer that had worse specs than these netbooks. Sans screen size my old computer had a marginally faster processor, less memory and a little more storage space than the high end netbooks available today.
What particularly interests me about netbooks is the fact that we’ve moved from the most power as we can squeeze into a computer mindset to a task oriented mind set. When you look at computers in terms of power, the people who need really powerful computers are mostly people who work in multimedia; graphic and video production and even then they don’t need all that power all the time. Netbooks represent just that we don’t need a Ferrari when a Chevy will do the job. I’m interested to see where netbooks go as far as penetration, usage, and market share.
[...] Creed I look in my spam folder here on Word Press and find this site which scraped my Netbook post. The only problem is he did it wrong, he only scraped a snippet of my post and linked back to [...]