Microsoft products often have long names. I'm running a machine with "Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2011 Standard" for example. I often truncate it SBS 2011 S. (SBS is canonically accepted shorthand.)
I'll admit to not having been on many netbook forums at the time. I suppose it makes sense, but it definitely remains a community-specific shorthand or nickname. Sort of like how nobody on a netbook forum would know what you were talking about if you said that you'd had a machine with some Feets.
In its time, which was in mid-2009 and earlier, the netbook limitations were reasonably well known. In the same way that Intel today defines the marketing term "Ultrabook" (whether or not they've been keeping a good handle on its use is probably up for debate though), Microsoft was basically defining what a "netbook" meant.
Netbooks led into CULVs which led into Ultrabooks, but I would argue that each of these things is a distinct thing, and that if you wanted to talk about form factors, you'd be talking essentially out of your rear end, because although most ultrabook vendors have a 11.6-inch model, I suspect most of them that get sold are 13-inchers. Given that Apple probably sells more machines that meet the UltraBook spec than any other PC vendor, and they've had their 11.6-inch model the longest, I'd be interested in seeing if anybody has some 11.6- vs 13-inch MBA sales number.
Windows 8 is also interesting because there is no "ultra low end" SKU. Windows 8 has two SKUs -- "Windows 8" -- and Windows 8 Pro. (Well, there's Enterprise as well, but for all intents and purposes the only way to get that is to have it given to you by your workplace.)
What this has done at least in part is implicitly raise the cost of a Windows 8 PC. When 8 first was released, there were alarmist reports all over saying that PC sales had slowed down. What it took the "analysts" some time to figure out is that this was at least in part to the sudden hole at the $200-600 level, especially on the mobile side of things. Fortunately, that hole is filling in fairly nicely as manufacturers figure out how to reduce the cost of these machines (sometimes using AMD parts, and sometimes by using Sandy Bridge parts from a generation or so back) and of course, with tablets and Windows RT devices.
It was said by David Pierce, writing for The Verge in a review of the
Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11 (RT) that Windows RT and devices like the Yoga 11 with RT are the true successors to the netbook mantle.
In particular (Keep in mind, this was two months before the release of Haswell) the Yoga 11 RT has similar to or better-than netbook specs with an operating system sold by its vendor as being useful for real work but worry- and maintenance-free and both "slate" as well as "desktop" operating modes. The device is called the Yoga because you open it like a clamshell laptop, and you keep opening and keep opening it even further until you've opened it literally full circle and you have a slate tablet in your hands. It also gets really long battery life doing (for ARM) challenging tasks such as YouTube with Flash, and as an added benefit, you can remote desktop to Windows systems, map file shares, and edit word/excel files, plus sync OneNote notebooks.
If it had been available when I was a student, there is 0 question whatsoever that I would have bought the Yoga 11 RT. And I think that's important. I did buy into the Chromebook idea, and I did buy into the tablets idea, but I never (paid for) a netbook.
Basically, Netbooks are the
fast food Apple Pies of the computer world -- in a bad way. (Warning: article was written before the iPad existed.) Why? Basically, netbooks are really small and portable, but they got really poor battery life. Additionally, they purport to offer extensive compatibility with existing Windows ecosystems -- you could take the knowledge you had gained when using your Pentium 4 desktop into this new ultraportable form factor, which is something off-putting about the original Netbooks which featured 128MB of ram, 600MHz celerons and only 8GB of storage. Linux just isn't something you can expect people to pick up and be okay with immediately with. But to put it lightly, the atom processors (even once they'd gained an additional gigahertz of clock frequency, bigger batteries, better displays, and a whole gigabyte of memory) just weren't going to provide enough oomph to run a good desktop computing experience.
The "zone of suck" is essentially why Apple dismissed the netbook idea back in 2007-2008 or so, and in a lot of ways, the original MacBook Air (2008, but at 13", definitely larger than a netbook) suffered from its era, because the Core2 chips Apple got Intel to make for the Air were so slow and low on performance that even with an SSD and two gigs of ram, the original Air was far from a powerhouse. Today's Haswell-based 13-inch Airs with 8 gigs of ram and 512 gigs of faster-than-SATA disk storage could probably outrun the original Mac Pro, all for $1600, and they can do it for seventeen hours at a time.
Although "can" and "a good idea" are certainly different things and if your intent is to outrun an original Mac Pro, the MacBook Pro (or a newer Mac Pro) is a better way to go, if for no other reason than that running a MacBook Air at 100% CPU utilization for a particularly long time has always been a good way to kill it.
What's even better about netbooks is that the first set of fast ones with the Z series Atoms were completely incapable of running software other than Windows. I don't think that to this day, there's a working GMA 500 driver for linux. They had good battery life (at least the Nokia Booklet did) but absolutely abysmal performance, and most of them really were priced above their station anyway.
Woefully, even though Windows RT is faster than these things, nearly as capable of "traditional computing" as most netbooks, and certainly capable of better battery life, many RT devices are really priced above their station. That and of course the vendors seem to be giving up on RT even faster than they gave up on netbooks. A smarter me would have seen this coming and bought the Lenovo Yoga 11 RT instead of the Microsoft Surface, but here we are, and I'm typing this post in notepad.exe on the Surface. (Using a bluetooth keyboard and mouse for the time being, for freedom of positioning.
As a sidenote (or maybe the only "on topic" bit) about what I've been doing lately -- I basically migrate between two places where I spend most of my time these days, my office and my room at home. When I'm doing this migration, I tend not to stop anywhere for a few hours and I no longer have classes where I perceive a need to follow along with what the instructor is doing, or work ahead on assignments, etc.
So, what I've got at the moment is a desktop at work on which I do most of my work, plus secondary and tertiary desktops that I remote into for certain things (like a Windows 7 machine to run the Windows Server 2008/2010 admin stack on.) I also have some Mac laptops at work.
At home, I've got a Mac desktop and a variety of PC laptops I've used over the years, and TECT, the server. Every once in a great while, the temptation strikes to try to take a regular laptop with me, but what I've realized is that I almost never need the oomph of a full laptop, nor do I ever feel like carrying four to six pounds of Intel, plus a charger.
Enter the Surface RT. With the type cover, I can basically use the Surface RT for anything I want all day long without worrying about carrying the charger. It weighs almost nothing and it does everything I really want to do when I'm out and about anyway, which is look at maps, type documents, and perform complicated mathematical analyses in Excel.
Because of that, I really hope that the vendors pursue RT and that Microsoft keeps it alive in what's essentially the testing phase for it as a product. It's interesting not only because it's "Windows" but without the maintenance and fuss and muss of "Windows" but also because it's not x86, and it's one of the first modern non-x86 computers with a desktop experience I've had in a while. It's sort of like a particularly well-dressed Raspberry Pi, but faster and with Windows. Also, for the Surface in particular, the reviews that peg it as a very tiny desktop computer that folds flat and fits in a bag are pretty right about this particular machine's design and form factor.
While I'm on the RT tangent-- I'd really love to see it come to other form factors. I can't express enough how much I like the Lenovo Yoga 11 RT and hope that they update it with new components for Windows 8.1. HP recently announced a
21-inch Android tablet called the Slate 21, and all I can think about is how I would love to have a Windows RT version of that device.
Going back to the "What I'm using" notion a little bit-- a 21.5-inch RT tablet that stays on my desk at home would become an awesome information appliance + thin client. Big displays are a lot more efficient than they used to be and Tegra 3 draws almost no power at all. THe Surface RT is currently drawing a grand 2w from my UPS, at what's basically full tilt for RT.
Unfortunately, this is one of those situations where I really want somebody to shut up and take my money, even though it may or may not be practical for everybody else. Unfortunately, even if Hewlett Packard thought that Windows RT on a tethered 21-inch "tablet" was a good idea, Microsoft might not let them do so, and HP has abandoned RT anyway. I would ask Dell for it, but they've one-upped me (but also given me power I don't necessarily need or want) by giving
the product I want an i3/i5, 4/8 gigs of ram and a big hard disk. This also doubled the price and put it well out of the league of RT. It's that awkward spot of computign where it's too powerful to buy for hilarity and to be a thin client, but not powerful enough for my actual tasks which would use its x86 processors.
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