MIG-31

Rising prices and better alternatives may mean curtains for netbooks.
The small portable computers were popular in 2009, but some industry watchers are convinced that their popularity is already waning.
"The days of the netbook are over," said Stuart Miles, founder and editor of technology blog Pocket Lint.

As prices edge upwards, net-using habits change and other gadgets take on their functions, netbooks will become far less popular, he thinks.
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Source: BBC News

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ET3D

Netbooks were never well defined, and grew to mean a notebook using an Atom CPU. If "death of netbooks" means people will stop using the name, that's fine with me. We still need small and light notebooks with good battery life, and I imagine many of them will continue to use an Atom.

BlueMak

Do you sell Atom based netbooks or do you have shares in Intel?

I can't figure out why so much love for the system.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

IvanV

I tend to agree that netbooks are converging towards "normal" laptops more and more. "Netbooks" started with the idea of being as cheap as possible and everything else was adjusted for that purpose, even portability.

The original Eee had a miniscule, low-res screen (7", 800*480), a wimpy and outdated 571MHz Pentium M (Dothan), "whopping" 2 or 4GB of storage, a customized Linux distribution, etc and it's battery life was nothing to get excited about.

The second generation grew in screen size (9" and 10" at 1024*600), storage capacity (ordinary mechanical drives) and price. On the other hand, most still came with low capacity batteries unable to keep the machines going for much over a couple of hours and they either came with Linux or an older version of Windows (XP).

What we're (hopefully) about to start getting are machines with specs that are hardly particularly unusual and distinctive, 12" 1280*800 (or 1366*768) screens, Windows 7 etc. They will have (more than) a couple of times greater screen surface area as well as the price than the original Eee and that will put them rather far away from the original idea, "as cheap and as small as possible", and will make them stick out much less from the rest of notebooks.

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OldBuzzard

Didn't the the "EXPERTS" , back when Netbooks were first released, claim that there wasn't a market for them and that they wouldn't sell?

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When looking for a reason as to why things go wrong, never rule out sheer STUPIDITY

Optix

The only thing I wanted a Netbook for was when I was playing Lord of the Rings Online and were were getting pwned in an instance. It would have come in handy looking up strategies since the alt+tab function was borked for a long while.

I don't play the game anymore so no real desire.

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