Netbooks are still all the rage these days, but according to Intel, this is going to change soon. The company has stated that they first thought that netbooks, who are almost exclusively powered by Intel chips, would be for emerging markets, but as it turns out, they are especially popular in Europe and North America. Intel claims that while these devices are "fine for an hour", they are not something for day to day use. And AMD? They are ignoring the market altogether.
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Member since:2006-01-06
I don't know if I'd call netbooks a "niche" market. They brought ASUS from a back end supplier up to a household brand, and also vaulted acer up to the top of notebook sales (if you include netbooks in there).
I for one believe that the netbook craze is reflective of a general trend...one away from increasingly higher powered, higher heat, higher cost hogs to cheaper, lower powered commodity appliances. Whoever truly figures out this appliance market has the potential power to make themselves the next household seller. If AMD & Intel don't want to lead in this market then I'm sure there are others who can get there....I have the ARM folks in mind, who I really believe should have tried this market a long time ago.
Member since:2006-01-19
The netbooks will to to the notebooks what the x86 PC did to the SGI IRIX workstations.
They will be increasing in calculation power while staying low on price and power consumption.
It will take its time, but the netbooks will continuously eat into the lower end notebook market.
Member since:
2006-07-25
as the above said, x86 is here to stay, not even intel could get rid of x86 (Itanium).
Ive heard that even some mobile phone companys will move over to x86 when it becomes a little leaner with power.
The netbook arena is a tight market because of the costs of the units, which of course is it's biggest seller. It's natural therefore that some companies don't want to get into it. AMD currently has it's work cut out remaining competitive with intel in the desktop and server market, let alone trying to enter another smaller niche market.
Edited 2008-11-28 13:19 UTC