Ultrabooks to Get the CES Spotlight, Netbooks Get the Knife
With ultrabook announcements expected to get all the attention at next week's CES, it's important to lament the ill-fated netbook -- left for dead by a callous and capricious tech industry. Patrick Thobodeau explains.
Thu, January 05, 2012
Computerworld — Some 150,000 people are expected to attend the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next week, and most of them kick netbooks to the curb as they rush to fawn over the pricey ultrabook and lower-cost full-sized laptops.
Slideshow: CES 2012 Gadget Preview
For sure, there will still be netbook announcements at CES, but this category of hardware is on its last legs -- at least in Western markets.
Vendors have already started to pull back. Just last month, Dell said that it's ending its netbook production. But before bidding netbooks a fond farewell, let's praise them as well as pin the blame on those responsible for their demise.
Netbooks were done in largely by three things:
Netbooks remain viable, useful and inexpensive, and their performance capabilities will only get better with Intel's new Atom chip. Dubbed, Cedar Trail , it is a dual-core Atom 32-nanometer chip with clock speeds of up to 2.13GHz.
But netbook vendors looking to showcase new models at CES will largely be consigned to the shadows by what's expected to be several ultrabook announcements. The irony is that at CES, where open electric outlets will be impossible to find, netbook users will be in the best position to survive the conference with working systems.
With six-cell batteries, most netbooks deliver battery life of between seven to nine hours. And it's easy to carry a back-up battery in a bag because netbooks don't take up a lot of space.
Netbooks, as a product category, arrived in 2007. Some of the initial models were lemons, including a 4GB flash drive Linux model by Asus (one of four netbooks I've owned) that shipped with about 95% of the hard-drive taken up by pre-installed applications. But it's hard, in hindsight, not to admire the creativity and experimentation the category engendered.
No doubt, sales of the iPad hurt the netbook market, as did the arrival of the MacBook Air, Apple's take on the thin, sleek and sexy ultrabook category. Thin and light, with a full-size keyboard, solid-state storage and a reasonably fast processor, the Air paved the way for what's coming.
But what may have hurt the netbook segment the most are the rules around it.
Netbooks ship with 1GB RAM and most vendors don't offer custom configurations. RAM upgrades (most support 2GB of memory) are a do-it-yourself option. That's one strike against netbooks.
The second strike against netbooks was delivered by Microsoft.
Microsoft initially considered shipping Windows 7 Starter edition -- the default OS on netbooks -- with a limit on the number of apps that could run at any one time to three. To its credit, Microsoft dropped that unreasonable limit , but the very idea of a restricted "starter" OS most likely chilled the market for Windows 7 on netbooks.
