Slate asks what does it mean that the top Amazon laptop sellers are netbooks. It is pretty stark, the top 20 sellers are windows netbooks or Macs, you have to get to #21 before a full size Windows laptop makes an appearance. It probably means that low priced laptops are capturing a lot of attention in an economy where everyone is concerned about costs, and also that the portfolio of top selling Windows laptops are stale while netbooks are new and fashionable.
I commented on Jeff’s blog posting:
I find the thought that the netbook craze is credit-crunch driven to be utterly laughable; since 1997 I have been trying to find the “perfect” laptop, in which time I have fitted out a Toshiba Libretto with a 30Gb hard disk, done a 2 week vacation trip to the USA with a Nokia N800 and Bluetooth Keyboard combination, bought a MacBook Air, and obtained an OLPC.
I have *always* wanted a smaller laptop than the “budget” machines on offer between 1999 and 2007, because the budget machines sucked. In some ways the perfect machine for me (of its era) was my 12″ polycarbonate iBook 700MHz G3 – except that it was an Apple and too damn expensive to do the sorts of things I wanted from a small laptop.
I wanted to go motorbiking with it. I wanted to sling it in a backpack and still have room. I wanted to drop it and not cry, risk spilling coffee on it, use it, blog from it, travel with it, create stuff on it, and above all not have to suffer bloody Windows XP.
I still have not found the perfect laptop for me, though the MacBook Air is damned close; Blackberries are too small and too limited, the OLPC is too slow but would give a toughbook a run for its money. The N800 is lovely but has an ARM processor and is too weird.
But it’s not the credit crunch.
The reason I know this is that I have a counterexample – in the middle of all this, around 2005 I bought a cheap R-series Thinkpad with a 13″ screen; in all ways it is bigger than the 12″ iBook and it’s as tough as old boots; an archetype of good cheap laptops it is one of the last of the IBM range, and works well… but it’s a damned tank and impossible to travel with. It weighs a ton, dominates any knapsack into which it is dropped, and comes with a enormous power brick.
Not a bikers / cyclists / casual travellers weekend laptop.
So: cheap, intel, small, light – pick any three, until the OLPC arrived and the vendors finally decided to change the size of their default parts set. Hurrah for the netbook, and I hope the vendors work out that the mistake was in letting their accountants design their earlier hardware.
ps: I also find the Slate author to be rather lacking in imagination (“plug in a USB keyboard” – for heaven’s sake) – I did a presentation about the future thin client at http://blip.tv/file/422428 more than a year ago, and although it’s already showing its age (flash memory heading to overtake disks) it still makes sense to me and is rather more exciting than Slate’s vision…
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