There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe and it has a longer shelf life - Frank Zappa
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VIA Netnote range blurs lines again
THERE WAS A TIME when, if your personal computer - or at least its monitor and keyboard - sat on your desk, it was called a desktop, and if it could sit on your lap without giving you a hernia and painful burns, it was called a laptop. Simple.
Then Apple introduced the Powerbook, and later the cheap and cheerful Ibook, and marketing departments throughout the world decided they liked the book analogy. Soon after the Notebook was born. Why the term laptop fell out of favour is not clear, although the earliest ones were rather heavy and were also called portable computers for that reason.
At that time, the fashion was for bigger and more powerful portable computers and media types with spinal injuries lugging laptops the size of suitcases were a common site on the streets of Hoxton and other international hives of creativity.
People with normal haircuts, however, were looking for smaller, lighter, cheaper alternatives to the enormously expensive desktop-replicating laptops of the time. What was the point of lugging around a fully-specced Mac or PC when all you really wanted to do with it was read the occasional email, check your stocks and shares on the Internet, and fend off the loneliness of another night in an anonymous hotel with a bit of one-handed surfing?
When the ill-fated and ultimately unsuccessful One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) foundation announced that it would be building a mobile computing device for $100 capable of connecting to the Interwibble and carrying out light office productivity tasks, many commentators guffawed with laughter. With its Fischer Price-styling, kid-friendly interface and prehistoric technical specs, the OLPC was seen as a bit of a joke. Fortunately for the future of computing, some people weren't laughing.
Intel saw a gap in the market and developed the Atom processor and soon after Taiwanese box builder Asus gratefully adopted Intel's pint-sized processor.
The word netbook was apparently first coined by PDA pioneer Psion and until recently the company has tried to maintain it had a copyright on the term. But soon after 2007 when Asus unveiled the Eee PC to an unsuspecting world, the term became generic.
There is no definitive specification for a netbook - or mini notebook or sub notebook as they are also known, just to add to the confusion - but general wisdom has it that, in order to qualify for the moniker, a computing device should have a screen of less than ten inches, weigh less than three pounds and cost less than $400.
Most come without an optical drive in order to keep down the size, weight and battery drain, along with scaled down keyboards. The vast majority have low-capacity hard drives and are powered by cut-down, older or open sauce operating systems. In fact, Microsoft was forced to repeatedly extend the shelf life of Windows XP because the bloated mess that was Vista simply wouldn't run on the new generation of pocketable PCs.
By this time every OEM in the galaxy had jumped on the netbook bandwagon and very soon diminutive offerings from Dell, Hewlett Packard and MSI were outselling their grown-up siblings, or at least making very large dents in their market shares.
Microsoft and Intel have been accused of trying to keep the netbook market in its place way below the traditional and more lucrative notebook market but, as is always the case, consumer demand will out and the lines between netbooks and notebooks becomes more and more blurred and confusing every day.
Adding to that confusion comes the announcement today that Taiwanese fabless box builder VIA wants us all to make room in our already overcrowded brains for a new category of small laptop. Ladies and Gentlemen… I give you [drum roll]… the Netnote. Oh God no. We just can't take much more of this!
VIA tells us that this new breed of laptops, which will be built using their Surfboard mobos, will "Blend the portability and affordability of netbooks with the functionality and HD video capabilities of notebooks to define a new sweet spot in the mobile computing market."
The company is planning to offer turnkey systems to OEMs which will find their way into 10 to 12-inch laptops, but the big selling point appears to be full HD 1080p video. As the maximum display resolution is 1366 x 768, we can only assume that HD playback will come in the form of an HDMI output hooked up to a bigger monitor or TV set.
The real question is, of course, do we really need yet another sub-category of laptop computer when the distinction between each class is ill-defined at best and non existant at worst?
The answer is no, by the way. µ
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Your characterization of the OLPC project is misguided and inaccurate. It's wildly successful. Just ask any of the more than a million kids in over 31 of the world's poorest countries.
There are solid guidlines for netbooks, if you are and OEM and want the Windows XP version for them, there are spec guidlines for them. You cannot make it a full notebook.
Since when did Microsoft have the right to decide what is a netbook and what is a notebook? Perhaps you let the mighty MS make all your decision for you?
Tell that to the six million kids who should have got machines which cost $100 but didn't. If I said I was going to work for seven hours tomorrow and only worked for one, that might be considered a failure on my part.
Game over.
Thanks to OLPC, not only do over a million kids have a better education and their whole families have a better access to IT, thanks to OLPC the whole indsutry had to start making cheap laptops, Intel and Microsoft's profit margins have shrinked rapidly, ARM Laptops are now to be the definite standard for the industry. And much sooner will there be real $100 laptops for everyone. And those $100 laptops will feel just like any overpriced $1500 Apple Air, actually run much longer on a battery, be better sunlight readable and much more durable.
Thanks to the OLPC, about 50 million people have Netbooks today instead of expensive laptops. That's a saving of several tens of billions of dollars for consumers of the world and all that less in profits for Intel, Microsoft and Apple.
The program over-promised and under-delivered. It simply failed to meet its goals and there's no arguing that. You think OLPC forced industry to make cheap laptops and created the Netbook market? Rubbish.
Moore's Law and pressure from smartphones did more to create the category than some ill-starred plasticky toy ever did.
Think about it, a Pentium M is all the capability most people need. It was low power and introduced six years ago. A $2000 laptop back then should have undergone 3 iterations of Moore's Law meaning it would be about $250. That's about the market price for one now.
It would be cheaper, not more expensive, to introduce a smaller but lower capability machine. That's the netbook. And you can bet it would not be a successful category if people did not want them, OLPC or not.
OLPC was a success in popularizing the concept of a modest-cost, modest-spec-yet-still-useful PC. The fact that others took the ball and ran with it shouldn’t distract from the fact that OLPC pioneered the ball.
Before OLPC all the idiot pundits said that no-one would buy a lower spec laptop. It was all "I want my full gaming rig on my lap!", "Excel Everywhere for me!" and "I want to watch high-def video wrapped around a spinning cube while I'm on the aircraft!", pooh-poohing efforts like that from Palm (the Foleo) which arguably preempted the netbook trend.
OLPC gave Microsoft and chums the willies because suddenly there was some kind of interest for lower end, lower spec machines. People didn't need "Tedious First-Person Shooter 17" running at 1000FPS - they might actually be satisfied reading their e-mail and looking at the Web and stuff after all. And people started to look at Microsoft and Intel with contempt: the former for bloating their products in order to keep the latter insisting on selling only the newest, latest, most expensive stuff.
So, yes, the whole OLPC thing taught the industry to listen to the people whose money is being spent, not the stupid pundits whose opinions turned out to be worth bugger all. In that sense, it was unquestionably a success.
The Inq unequivocably has the best commenters on the Interwobble.
Yes, the OLPC *was* what lead to netbooks.
an OLPC, so I can bring it to the pub, get on the wibble -and watch the local clientele oooh and aaah over the kids toy with youtube. My hundred bucks are ready to go.
Before OLPC, Intel's interpretation was "We add more features, we increase the "performance", we add more bloat and keep the prices as high as possible to make the most profit margins".
Since the OLPC, Intel was forced to make Atom, they were forced to lower the average PC processor costs from about 50-100 dollars to about 30 dollars for Atom.
Microsoft was forced to make a lower bloat Netbook edition of Windows XP even though Microsoft had planned to discontinue Windows XP and they were forced to sell XP Netbook edition for $30 instead of the usual $50-100 Windows licences that you would usually get on 95% of shipped computers.
Thanks to OLPC, your next Laptop may very well be sunlight readable and turn into an e-ink quality screen in tablet mode for the same price.
Thanks to OLPC, your next Laptop may very well be powered by an ARM processor instead of Intel and thus cost even half the price of an average Atom powered laptop and run twice as long on a battery.
All these names marketing people give the Laptops should just all be cancelled and people should all just call all these Laptops, cause that's what they are. Intel and Microsoft were the ones in need to have it be called Netbooks instead of "Small Laptops", and to enforce several limitations on them like limit them to tiny screen sizes, tiny hard drives, limit RAM, forbid HDMI/DVI output, try to block Expresscard slots or second mini-PCI module functions. Now Intel and Microsoft are desperately trying to pull the market up again to "thinner laptops" with the whole CULV thing instead of "cheaper laptops", also asking OEMs to add all kinds of bloatware like SSD drives, put larger batteries, make them appear to be even thinner, all that to try desperately to keep the average sold netbook price up over $400.
"Then Apple introduced the Powerbook, and later the cheap and cheerful Ibook, and marketing departments throughout the world decided they liked the book analogy. Soon after the Notebook was born."
Err, no. The first portable computer idea was called a *book that I'm aware of was way back in 1968:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook
Portable laptops being called notebooks pre-dates the Apple Powerbook (1991) by at least two years:
http://articles.latimes.com/1989-07-23/business/fi-135_1_personal-computer
netbooks, ultra-thins, ultraportables, notebooks, desktop replacement, and now netnote. i'm running out of memory space. there's no line left to blur now.