This Is My Confession
I owned three netbooks back in the day. The first was the original netbook, the Eee PC 701 4G. While the “4G” had nothing to do with its network connection, the machine wasn’t half bad.
It was all the way bad.
I later moved on to the HP Mini 1000 and then the Dell Mini 9. The HP had a fairly decent keyboard, and the Dell Mini 9 ran OS X 10.5 Leopard like a champ.
Fundamentally, however, all three of these notebooks had the same problems — small screens, crappy keyboards and trackpad and Windows XP. But more on all of this in a bit.
The Tablet Killed the Netbook Star
As netbooks trudged on from the 701’s 2007 launch, they slowly became more fragmented. Screen sizes slowly grew, the Intel Atom processor showed up in most models, and some even eventually got Windows Vista.
What a winner.
When Apple announced the iPad in January 2010, Steve Jobs discussed the netbook:
Jobs was right. While the netbook was already on decline by early 2010 — at least in mindshare. The iPad, however, seems to have just about killed them off.
This All Seems Familiar
Starting this quarter, Intel has been pushing “ultrabooks” on to the market. These machines are all built around a set of specifications from the chip maker. They all have SSDs, CULV Intel processors and 11.6 or 13.3-inch displays.
Sounds familiar? It should — mainly because the MacBook Air wasn’t around in 2007 for PC companies to copy.
Now, It Really Seems Familiar
Here’s Joanna Stern at The Verge, reviewing the Acer Aspire S3:
“Ugh, this keyboard!” That may not have been the very first sentence I typed on the chiclet panel, but it was surely amongst the second or third. As I mentioned before, the plastic deck feels shockingly cheap, and the matte keys sprouting out of it are no different; they are flimsy, mushy, and grossly flat. The spacing on the keyboard is perfectly adequate, but why Acer had to make the arrow keys smaller than a peanut (literally) is beyond me.
[…]
It probably won’t come as a shock that the 3.5 x 2.5-inch touchpad similarly suffers from quality issues. It too feels overly plasticy and chintzy like a Fisher Price toy. But I am happy to report the responsiveness of the multitouch surface is better than I expected — I didn’t encounter any jumping cursors and two-finger scrolling was relatively smooth for a Windows laptop.
The S3 isn’t the most expensive or the nicest ultrabook on the market. However, it was one of the first, and one of the cheapest. To be honest, its low price appeals to the people who walk into a Best Buy to buy a computer without any research.
The problems Stern outlines in her review — and other ultrabook reviews — aren’t new to the tiny, Windows-based notebook world.
Is It All About Power?
While ultrabooks may look and feel like netbooks, the processors tucked inside have improved over their ancestors. Coupled with SSDs, these new machines are even faster. However, PC builders can’t seem to get the rest of the package right.
Shocking, right?