This post is the first in a three part series on the newest category of personal computers, netbooks and other minimalistic computers. If you don’t follow portable electronics, you may not be familiar with the term netbook. Netbooks belong to a new class of portable computers that are trying to fill a space between smart phones/PDAs and notebook/laptop computers. Unless you’ve been totally unplugged from technology news for the past six months, you’ve probably seen news stories about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO laptop and the Asus Eee PC, both of which are textbook examples of netbooks. Netbooks are cheap, small, low-power computers for doing just the computing basics. Why netbook? These computers are being aimed at a generation of computer users who exist completely on the Internet. Do you read your e-mail, get your news, pay your bills, watch your shows, and communicate with your friends and colleagues from within a web browser? Then you’re a prime candidate to purchase a new netbook. I sure am!
While some would credit the OLPC XO laptop with blazing the netbook trail, I think credit is due to Asus, the maker of the Eee PC. Please don’t think that I am trying to belittle the noble efforts of OLPC, but commercial success is not among their goals, unlike Asus. I have a hard time imagining the board meeting during which someone stood up an pitched the Eee PC. Let’s build a PC that is smaller and less powerful than a typical laptop, then we’ll put an OS that nobody has heard of on it, with an interface like nobody else’s, and sell it for half the price of the cheapest laptop on the market. Amazingly, somebody say okay and the rest is history. The Eee PC sold out before other computer makers could blink. Now the rest of the industry wants a piece of the action. The latest to announce an ultra-light, ultra-cheap netbook is Dell, who cleverly put a prototype into the CEO’s hands as he walked around the All Things D conference in May…bravo.
What’s so appealing about these minimalistic laptops? I work each day on one of the 10 fastest computers in the world, so I can tell you a thing or two about computer performance. Very few users need 1/10th the power that their personal computer provides, but every year we feel the need to buy faster and faster computers. Unless video editing, computer generated graphics, digital music production, or PC gaming is your cup of tea, you’re buying too much computer for yourself. While the aforementioned activities are becoming far more popular, likely due to the increased power available to computer users, an increasing number of people are using their computers almost exclusively as a portal to the Internet. If I can do this from a computer that’s lighter, cooler, cheaper, and probably consumes less power, why wouldn’t I? Even basic photo and video editing can now be done online. Face it, most people think photo editing means getting rid of red eye and cropping and they think video editing is adding transitions and music, all of which can be done online for free. Even when such activities need to be done on the local computer, netbooks have plenty of oomph to get it done for most people.
So where are netbooks lacking? Although one could do banking completely online, I feel that most people will still want Quicken or Money to keep their financial data close to home. I don’t blame them, that’s how I feel. While it may be practical to store one’s complete photo library online, it’s unlikely the someone will do the same with music and videos, so there still needs to be a machine somewhere in the home for multimedia storage hogs. Nobody is claiming that a netbook will ever be your only computer, but there’s been little talk about how to tie your netbook back to your home computer. I’ll address this more in a later post. The name netbook also implies that one really needs the Internet to survive with such a device. Cloud computing is the buzz work du jour, but wireless internet is not yet ubiquitous, so the netbook needs to remain useful, even when it is disconnected. Products such a Adobe Air and Google Gears seem so promising for such a computing environment, but they’re still very immature.
Personally, I think a netbook is a very appealing product. When I look at how my wife and I use our computers, I see us using a lot of computation power to do very little. I think a small, cheap laptop replacement is exactly what we, and most computer users, need for our day-to-day computing and I can’t wait to see future minimalistic computer products. I truly thought that my next laptop would be a Macbook (for reasons outside of the scope of this article), but now I feel fairly confident that our next computer will be a netbook. Portable, simplistic, cheap…it’s a win all around.
Be sure to come back for my next post in the series: Why Microsoft (and Apple) is missing the boat on netbooks.