Guest post by 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.
I am typing this from a trusty EeePC that Asus was selling back in January-February with Linux in Germany.
I already written a few times that I don’t see an usage for a tablet vs a laptop in the context of content creation.
But with the increase of tablets with keyboards, I am starting to think that might be a actually possible.
However most tablet OS are not a proper replacement for current desktop OS. At least for the type of work I do personally (software development on the go).
For that I recently ordered a ARM-based Chromebook, it will be running Ubuntu for a while until I have time to play with installing a Debian.
It looks to me kind of like a cheap ARM-based plastic Macbook Air.
The ARM-chip is the same as the highend mobile phones will have in 2013.
It has a GPU by ARM too, the Mali, for which there already was an open source driver being developed. They’ve gotten pretty far with it in the year they’ve been working on it now.
Anyway, the binaries for the closed source driver are userspace and not tied to the kernel version so it should be fairly easy to work with.
So I hope this device will be fully open in a year.
There is a non-GPU accelerated version of Ubuntu which can be easily installed already called ChrUbuntu.
And there is an Ubuntu/Debian developer working on getting Ubuntu 13.04 running on it with the closed source binaries to have accelated GPU.
You can try a Surface Pro at the end of this month. Its a hair thicker and a little heavier than a Surface RT.
It runs full Windows 8 and has a Core i7 processor so it should run whatever you throw at it.
Battery life sucks since its a high grade processor, but I think its something like 4hrs. (Compared to 8hrs for the Surface RT, though I get closer to 10 on mine).
Either that, or the Acer W501 is good. It runs Windows 8, uses Clovertrail and has an 8hr battery life. Comes with Windows 8 and a keyboard dock at no extra charge (vs $100 more for Surface Keyboard)
The netbook market never died, it just matured at 11.6″ with a 1366×768 resolution.
I can get an Elitebook, MacBook, or Thinkpad at this size. Yes, the price range is $500 – $1200 new, but portability is king these days, and the build quality is awesome compared to any $250 notebook.
What makes it sad to me is for a little while there you were getting frankly pretty powerful units at affordable prices, I paid $350 USD for my EEE PC, its got an AMD E350 dual core and does 1080P over HDMI and after 3 years still runs like a champ, even has full VM support so if I need to go to some website to download drivers for a customer I can just fire up a Puppy Linux VM and away I go.
That said its obvious who killed the netbook…Steve Ballmer. He raised the price of Windows from the $15-$25 they were paying for XP to nearly $40 just for basic and by doing so simply made netbooks a money losing proposition. Considering this is the same man that is about to hand ALL of the Windows OEMs over to Google on a silver platter by getting Microsoft in the X86 hardware business? We really shouldn’t be surprised.
Its a shame that ChromeOS didn’t come out with a true offline mode as maybe they would have saved the netbook, but I know there are a LOT of us that will be hanging onto our netbooks for dear life. After all where else am I gonna get a system that weighed less than 3 pounds, gets 4 hours even after 3 years of use on the battery, and even plays L4D and the Portal games for less than $400 with 8GB of RAM and a carrying case?
I think the consumer gets to take some of the blame too, although I agree Ballmer made a big effort to stick a fork in netbooks. But the consumer saw the first EEEPCs and said “I love it, but wish it ran Windows instead of this weird Linux thing made by Xandros.” Then when it got Windows consumers wished it had more capacity, so they went with hard drives instead of SSDs. Then they wanted a slightly bigger keyboard. And boom, they were back to having a Windows laptop.
Then the ipad came along, which looked and acted sufficiently different consumers realized they couldn’t just wish it were more like the Windows laptops they were accustomed to, and buckled down to figure out the new interface. (Having tons of cool apps didn’t hurt).
My point is, I feel like the market bent to consumer will (and Ballmer’s shotgun) and netbooks got warped back into the ‘familiar format’ everyone knows and actually kind of hates. And when they finally got what they wanted they realized they actually don’t like it.
Ipads also turned heads because they were ‘new’ and it was a nice change from XP/Vista.
I’m sorry but you are wrong and here is why: blaming the consumer ignores the fact that the OEMs made HORRIBLE calls when it came to Linux. What they SHOULD have done is made their own fork off of Debian Stable, that would give them an underpinning with a nice long support cycle and then put on a nice friendly GUI along with their own GUI front end to the repos to make it more like an appstore.
What we GOT was…drumroll…Xandros, a company that was already on the ropes thanks to a disastrous purchase of Scalix leaving the company dead broke, and Linpus…really? Linpus? And your points about the hardware are frankly off as well, it was the OEMs that switched because the price of the chips used in those bottom of the barrel SSDs went through the roof so frankly it was cheaper to slap a 300GB HDD in them than buy a 32GB SSD. If you’ll look up the review of the first EEEs you’ll see the “SSD” was frankly more like a flash stick, REALLY shitty throughput and not great power draw but they were dirt cheap which was all that Asus cared about with them.
But what killed the netbook were 3 things, Intel killed ION by killing the Nvidia chipset business, the last AMD CEO burnt the company to the ground by firing all the engineers thus leaving them with no follow up to Brazos and struggling to get enough Brazos chips out the door to fill demand, and of course Ballmer getting stoned and deciding that if he jacked the price on Windows it would be seen as being “hip and trendy” like Apple.
But the consumer wasn’t the problem, it was the OEMs. In point of fact I was having hell just getting any Brazos netbooks at all to sell, the OEMs ended up using what few brazos chips they could get on their full size laptops and only selling Atom netbooks which frankly were like a bad joke, even Linux couldn’t polish THAT turd. This is why you see Brazos netbooks selling for nearly $500 on Amazon and being sold out, its not that people didn’t want the netbook form factor, its just that they wanted it with a chip that didn’t feel like something from the 90s.
I sure as hell ain’t going to buy a tablet. So if no one will make me a ValleyView netbook (at least a 10.1” one, though I’d prefer 8.9”), I’ll simply stay with my trusty Aspire One A110 forever.
“However most tablet OS are not a proper replacement for current desktop OS. At least for the type of work I do personally (software development on the go).”
That’s the problem.
You do software development on a netbook? It’s hard to see how well that works, with the tiny screen and slow processors… my old Asus netbook is adequate for internet access and email writing (better than my phone, at least), but how can you do anything more demanding on them?
Tell that to Mario Zechner. He wrote a best-selling, chart-topping book, the number one game engine and a number of nice Android games on a tiny netbook.
If you can’t get work done on a decent netbook, it’s 95% because you are lazy and/or not talented. Please stop blaming your lack of success on the hardware
Edited 2013-01-03 10:33 UTC
Like I used to do since the early 90’s.
Virtual monitors, a decent Emacs configuration and a few open shells.
And I don’t need no Internet connection all the time eating my batteries.
Ideal mini-workhorse while waiting for the plane and during flights, or while traveling on the train.
You can get Emacs on a tablet. I’m using an Asus Eee Pad Transformer, and I have a shell and Emacs, and battery life of 18 hours.
FWIW, your Transformer isn’t a ‘typical’ tablet. It comes with a keyboard, whereas most other tablets have keyboards as a cumbersome bolt-on solution.
Even so, I can’t run a tiling WM on Android, AFAIK. Whenever I do some programming work (not my full time job, though), tiling + tmux + vim (+ plugins) are the bare minimum for me. I find taking my fingers off the keyboard to use the touchpad cumbersome enough (netbooks don’t come with trackpoint nubs), so I sure as hell ain’t gonna reach for the touchscreen.
Edited 2013-01-04 12:07 UTC
I still hold netbook for one of the best things that has ever happened to the mobile computing. I’ll sure keep mine as long as it lasts.
And I while everyone around seems to badly need one, no one has actually provided me with a good reason, why the heck should I (with what my intended use would be) buy a tablet. The only reason that could have come close to being reasonable seems to be better served with e-ink based reader… another device I like and for whose future I fear.
Hold on, isn’t a netbook a tablet with a keyboard…kinda like a Chromebook which still exists and no reason both can’t/wont coexist,whatever they’re called in the future.
I have a Toshiba Thrive, which is a tablet but with real USB port so I can hook a real keyboard and mouse. I can with bluetooth as well. But it isn’t quite as good. Yet with hacker’s keyboard I can type short messages. So it works for browsing, but as someone pointed out, not really for development.
Perhaps the replacement might be a cheap ultrabook. There were small laptops before the netbook – my old Avaratec is only slighty larger and had a DVD drive.
Netbooks were cheap, until you started adding bluetooth, an eternal optical drive, and the rest. So we will see – it may still live in something which is a bit more powerful but small but not that much more expensive.
My mother will be disappointed by this since she wants something more portable than a laptop that she can type on. However, since I don’t travel much but also have no need for a phone, I’m going a slightly different direction.
Things like netbooks are too big to fit in my pocket so I’m researching folding bluetooth keyboards for coding and writing on my OpenPandora.
with a detachable keyboard, a touchscreen and .. oh, wait!
I see your point and raise you:
– Google, Apple, or Microsoft spying on you if you want full functionality.
– Imperfect support for hardware keyboards and gaming controls.
– A shortage of good, GPLed applications like gVim, Comix, and Brogue with trustable, easy-to-replicate packaging processes. (I like Gentoo and Debian)
– You’re paying for GPS and cellular with no hardware kill switch even if you’d sooner fry those chips than unset Airplane Mode to use the WiFi.
– The hassle of detachable hinges breaking or detaching when you don’t want them to.
– Closed-source drivers and a GUI which doesn’t encourage hacking from the outset.
I think you can see why I’ll stick with buying a folding bluetooth keyboard for coding on my OpenPandora or, when I don’t need battery life, using a BIOS-based x86 laptop.
(…though my mother would be happy with anything that replicates her 2Ghz Lubuntu-based laptop in a purse-sized package so she can comfortably write stories and articles on the go.)
I do use my ASUS transformer a lot and it is almost always docked. We do mail, some browsing, im, irc, .. using the tablet with keyboard.
But when I want to search something on the internet I notice I almost always use the laptop. It is just so much easier and faster. Also for office stuff I always power up the laptop.
I need the size of the transformer and the functionality of a laptop.. oh wait.. it exists, it’s called a netbook.
My netbook did everything it needed to do with ubuntu as main os and a virtual xp install. When running the virtual xp it still worked better/faster than another similar netbook running only a clean win 7!
There certainly is a market, only they should add an OS suited for the job, so no blown up win or linux or ..
Yes, but my point is about the near future.
Take a netbook, make the screen a touchscreen (with no loss of functionality as a regular screen) and make the keyboard detachable (again, with no loss of functionality), what do you get? Now take a tablet, add a detachable keyboard and the ability to install and use any regular PC operating system, what do you get? Same device!
I’m not saying the netbook is gone forever. I’m saying that the distinction between tablets and netbooks might soon be erased.
You’re focusing on the hardware here. But there’s a big difference in software: Tablets are generally locked and are using a “mobile” OS. Installation of other OSes is difficult at best, if not impossible.
Netbooks are open. Even if one came with Win7 preinstalled, you can remove that or in addition to it install your choice of Linux/*BSD/Haiku/other. And these are “full” OSes. I run on my netbook the exact same system as on my desktop.
That’s not by definition:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/zatab-zareasons-open-tablet
My point is that the touchscreen is here to stay, until someone invents something even cooler. There’s no reason to go back to plain old screens. A computing device with a touchscreen can support a multitouch UI. By definition, this kind of device is a tablet. Again, the concept of “tablet” is only defined by hardware, not software. Otherwise it would make no sense to speak of open tablets where you are allowed to install whatever operating system you want. But those exist.
So, tablets will continue to dominate, with different operating systems, different degrees of openness and so on. Soon the open ones will have the computing power to run a regular PC operating system just like a netbook does. Then netbooks will become redundant.
In short, yes, netbooks may stay for some time, but in the long run (a couple of years) all netbook-sized computing devices will be tablets.
It is the Microsoft Surface. The form factor is perfect. Detachable keyboard that you don’t even know is there, nearly the same WPM as on my laptop keyboard, great for content consumption which Netbooks are positioned for.
It’s light, has an eight hour battery life, and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg like an Ultrabook.
(Ok, this is an invitation, as Surface isn’t exactly the most popular device on OSNews, but I think the form factor and the attachable keyboard is a lot better than alternatives.)
Except it runs Windows. No thanks.
+1 Insightful.
Not.
Please note the limits put onto net-books by both Intel and Microsoft plus others.
To my knowledge, no net-book comes with more that one memory slot nor do they any net-books let you expand memory to more than 2GBs. That limit alone cripples applications.
Second, Window Starter refuses to set my Aspire One built-in display to a greater resolution than 1024*600, yet the Device Manager shows I have a 1280*1024 display and Haiku-OS does let me use this resolution. The text may be small but pictures look great.
Limits like these imposed by marketing people are why net-books are dying as a class of computer.
Edited 2013-01-03 02:38 UTC
Agreed, Microsoft and Intel are the reason netbooks are failing.
Microsoft’s laundry list of neutering restrictions in order to be allowed to sell them with Windows on them to ensure that they couldn’t succeed at the time since XP was the only thing Microsoft had that would even run marginally well on any hardware, even full blown overclocked gaming desktops.
Intel with the GMA500, 600, 3600, and 3650 IGPs from PowerVR used in the Atoms, the early Atoms being chained to crappy power hungry chipsets or being kneecapped in the case of the N330 dual core/quad thread Atom. If you wanted any kind of performance you had to find an N330 with the Nvidia ION chipset, but the CPU had no powersaving mode by design and the configuration was exceedingly rare in Netbooks.
This wouldn’t have been a problem had Linux been properly deployed on Netbooks, and the other market segments it was being tried at the time, but we all know how that crap went down… And they say having a million and one distros is a good thing for Linux…
So, what should a Netbook be in 2013? I list these because they are completely doable with today’s technology:
An 18w AMD E2-1800 or E2-2000 with 2x2Gb-2x8Gb of low voltage DDR1333, pushing a matte 10″ 2560×1600 screen, 2-3 USB 3.0 port, Mini DisplayPort out, 1-2 miniPCIe and an Expresscard slot. OS options? Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04(stop whining, you know how to replace it with another distro don’t you?).
If not that then possibly something ARM based, though around the quad core Cortex-A15/Mali-T678 in the 2-2.5Ghz range with all of the above save for the Expresscard and miniPCIe slots but it WILL NEED a standard SATA connector so as to use off the shelf drives and it MUST have an unlocked bootloader so that you can put ANY os you like on it, even if that means it will never run Win8 RT.
Edited 2013-01-03 22:22 UTC
Were the pinnacle of Intel failing the open source community. By choosing a closed spec graphic chipset. And to prove how bloated was vista at that time.
But they were also a promise of inexpensive computer that fitted 90% of computer user at that time.
That was really the case only with PowerVR-based Intel GFX chipset – which was used only in minority of netbooks, IIRC. Most used i845 or the like, with Intel GFX hardware and nice OSS drivers.
Pretty much all Intel netbooks on the market today are CedarView, which means PowerVR chip. So no, not “minority”, quite the opposite.
The few that aren’t CedarView are Pineview – GMA3150, basically an i945 moved into the CPU, in other words quite crappy (no hardware vertex shaders, no hardware video decode, generally low performance).
Edited 2013-01-03 22:00 UTC
Though dvhh was talking about the past, the times of Vista, referring to the inexpensive netbooks available back then. And, IIRC, they typically shipped with i945 – the PowerVR models were a bit premium ones back then.
BTW, that Intel GFX isn’t really so bad – yeah, slow, but OTOH it can be also described as “fast enough” for its typical usages.
Netbook is just marketing nomenclature for a notebook that is small and cheap.
I have an older vaio netbook running windows 8 and imho it is totally useless for anything serious. I cant type anything more than a paragraph on it without getting the urge to stomp on it – my laptop is a thinkpad so maybe I am too used to a decent keyboard.
I can see why a ‘netbook’ would be useful to people with smaller fingers than myself but for me it really is just a ridiculously small notebook.
I don’t think we are seeing the end of this class of device. What I am glad to see is that manufacturers are trying out all sorts of things.
Look at the variety we have now! Surface, IdeaPad Yoga, iPad, ThinkPad Carbon X1, Chromebook. Finally we are moving away from the era of the beige box and trying out some new and innovative designs.
I agree. Want a Netbook these days? Buy a second hand Thinkpad x61 or similar.
I don’t understand why people keep comparing tablets and netbooks. They are two different categories.
If you like to compare stuff, compare netbooks with laptops. This is a useful comparison. Does a netbook do a good job or do you need to spend extra cash on a laptop.
A tablet is a touchscreen with a computer hidden beneath it.
If you want a tablet and get a netbook you’re not happy and if you really want a netbook and someone gives you a tablet you’re not pleased either.
How about a (theoretical) Surface with a Clovertrail chip?
Has an attachable keyboard (optionally tactile), reasonable processor, can run x86 apps, and can become a Tablet when need be.
Also Clover Trail Win8 tablets get 8+hrs of battery life.
I’d certainly buy it in a heartbeat over the Surface RT I have now, which has a weaker processor than my Lumia 920.
I’d consider that to be a tablet with a keyboard accessory.
In our field it’s often difficult to draw a line somewhere, but if a computer can be used as a touch screen tablet without a keyboard I consider it a tablet.
A netbook can’t be used without a keyboard, which can’t be removed anyway.
But would there be any difference functionally? Especially if price can come down a tiny bit more?
I think the formfactor has merits (though not so much the actual physical dock keyboards which are clunky and heavy) but the keyboard on my Surface is like a book cover. And deceptively, almost amazingly accurate.
I feel like I use it for what I’d use a netbook for. Light browsing, email, some Document processing.
And it’s light, has great battery life, etc.
I think Netbooks and Tablets have a great chance to converge than Ultrabooks+Netbooks. It’ll be interesting to see where MSFT takes this keyboard concept.
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.
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.
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.
You have serious issues. The comment you respond to is critical of the Surface. Are you blind?
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.
I hope other vendors see the Surface and see what can be done with a little bit of ingenuity.
I got my hands on a W501 by Acer and its an amazing little device. Its lighter, thinner, and has better battery life than the Surface all while running an Intel Clover trail processor …. but it pains me so much to part with my Touch Cover.. its seriously that good.
Why not keep both devices?
I have to decide which one I want to gift away to my mother. I’m leaning towards the Surface after today though.
I plugged in the W501 to an external display and did some programming with it. Writing Windows Store apps on the same machine you deploy them to is pretty neat. Feels futuristic.
No, your mother wants an iPad.
Give it to me instead.
LMAO. I wish that were true. She hogs my Surface
I wanted an ARM netbook, I had money for one but I never saw anything to buy, there were a few ARM netbooks but the were either very low quality or expensive.
I just bought 3 Onda (Chinese) tables with dual core processors for £90 I would have bought them with keyboards but they didn’t exist.
aarm64 hopefully brings interesting things with its more mips like 64bit instruction set. It could be a bust or could seriously entrench arm in mid range portables or somewhere in between.