Asus is the company that shook up the laptop market a couple of years ago with their introduction of the EeePC netbook. And with their announcement that they will no longer be producing netbooks in 2013, Charles Arthur over at the Guardian UK has declared that the netbook era has now come to an end. Sad news for those of us who still love our netbooks! Harry McCracken over at Time Mag thinks they'll be back. Anybody who spends time wiping the smears off their tablet's touchscreen might agree.
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Member since:2005-11-29
Tbh, no. The form factor is nice (which is why I wanted to discuss the merits of it vs traditional notebooks and how I feel the two are becoming one in the same) but the execution of the Surface RT is lacking. Its underpowered and has its share of caveats which show me it needs more iteration. The hardware side of the equation is flawless from an ergonomics standpoint, but the internals and the software need some work.
Member since:2006-01-06
man nelsonj you sound like an MS shill/astroturfer repeating the same surface ad multiple times in this thread. I havent seen much good said about the surface keyboards which is a dealbreaker. My experience with core i7's is that they overheat in full laptop chassis, the cpu locks at 99C, the ram overheats at 130C and crashes the system. I dont see how a tablet format is going to magically fix these problems.
Member since:2011-05-12
Well, it's version 1 I don't think there are a lot of version 1's of any company that are instant winners. The iPhone was, but it actually wasn't that good at all.
Microsoft is known to improve from version to version.
From Apple I expect more of the same regarding tablets, but Microsoft could come up with something novel. They may not be doing that well right now, but I feel the stars and planets are aligning.
Their current products have flaws, but the ideas are often good and they've shown they can and are willing to think different. Once they fix the flaws they should have a pretty solid lineup.
Member since:
2011-05-12
Are you trying to sell me a Surface? :-p
To me a netbook is a cheap laptop, it's small and less powerful. A tablet has a touch interface, with optional keyboard, and is shaped like a tablet.
If you can attach a keyboard to a tablet and it works fine that's great. With a netbook you can't detach the keyboard.
I have a netbook and I'm happy I didn't pay for it. It's slow and I can't get used to the crappy keyboard.