The End of the Netbook

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Tue Jan 01, 2013 2:21 pm

Sayonara, netbooks: Asus (and the rest) won't make any more in 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... -dead-2013

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Tue Jan 01, 2013 6:41 pm

The writing has been on the wall. I've come to the conclusion that tablets are computers for people that don't know how to type. And those who do just use laptops. Which isn't so bad these days with how thin & small the full sized ones are getting.

b-man1 · Post by **b-man1** » Tue Jan 01, 2013 6:47 pm

i'd still take a Surface RT or Surface Pro w/ the "typing" keyboard (not the thinner touch one) in place of a laptop. i agree on the netbook thing though...just not enough room in the market for them.

Hipnotic_Tranz · Post by **Hipnotic_Tranz** » Wed Jan 02, 2013 6:49 pm

Wish they went sooner.

The K-12 district I work for pushed for a 1:1 environment and decided to give out obsolete Dell Netbooks (mini 1012) to ~2200 middle school students. Even if the device was decent from the start, we had very little time to implement. By the time we were officially told the direction we were going to the point that we distributed them out to the kids was roughly 3.5 months.

Did I mention we had to have a vendor do the wiring & hang some 100 APs, which of course were not Cisco as we had everywhere else at the time (meaning I had to learn as I go), purchase and configure all switching, another tech to build an image and we all had to sit in a room for 3 weeks imaging the beasts? First round weren't even on the domain, users were full blown admins and could trash them as they pleased (meaning we were going to HAVE to re-image them that summer anyway). Oh, did I also mention this was during a large management upheaval that pushed out the director and Network admin? Oh, did I mention this was also while we were trying to move our Data Center so they could tear down the building for....some reason yet to be known. Did I mention we were short staffed at the time?

It's been a failure, with no surprise to us techs, and completely derailed our department for a good part of a year. Fortunately, there were enough problems, mostly related to the end device (an obsolete POS as noted) which has caused the board to hesitate moving forward at this pace.

Good 'ol public Ed. I need to find somewhere else...

ZYFER · Post by **ZYFER** » Thu Jan 03, 2013 3:50 pm

For the most part, Ultrabooks and Tablets have taken their place for portability. People really aren't so interested a mini laptop with a weak processor anymore. Seeing how you can get an Ultrabook now which is thinner than like every netbook I've ever seen with a Core i5 in it, can't really be too surprised can you?

Netbooks have always been intended for portability, not the poor. Those looks for a cheap laptop, get a regular low-end model, others who made the mistakes of buying a netbook usually returning them quite quickly. Not to say they aren't capable machines, but they don't scale well. Still with a very Flash heavy internet, you can see how they put older/slower computers to the test.

Using anything less than Pentium M for web browsing these days for web browsing is asking for headaches. What to play those little facebook games? You'll need more than even the Pentium M can offer.

I can only argue it as poor programming though. What has barely Super Nintendo graphics is using 0.5 - 1GB of RAM and working your processor hard. Hopefully Flash can be replaced sooner rather than later.