News - Netbooks taken off the Toshiba (USA) menu

[HEXUS]

Let them eat cake, er, get an Ultrabook.

Read more.

[DDY]

The main attraction of the netbook is its low cost. But of course manufacturers like Toshiba who couldn't help themselves, jumped on the bandwagon and floged these slower and less capable machines at the same price of regular laptops, and now they'll evolve in to even more expensive machines in the form of the Ultrabook. I think there is still a place for the netbook provided the costs are low, but the focus now on more profitable tablets at comparable price points will preclude any further development of netbooks – in other words, the netbook is dead.

[Funkstar]

I don't think the netbook is dead, it just isn't the golden box shifter it was a few years ago, there are other products that cover the selling points of the original netbooks.

Netbooks were a lot smaller and in many ways more convenient than regular laptops, tablets now do this as well, so do ultrabooks as well as small form factor laptops with non-Atom processors.

I can't see them going away altogether, but some manufacturers - like Toshiba - that need more than just volume of product will move away from this segment.

[bobharvey]

The only reason I am tempted to change my netbook is the dissapointingly restrictive 600 vertical pixels. If I go and blow nearly 900 quid on an ultrabook I will end up with 768. No point, is there?

[peterb]

I think netbooks have become an evolutionary dead-end, ousted by the tablet and the ultrabook. Laptops are falling in price anyway, and a linux system can be installed on a bare bones laptop to achieve the same result.

[Funkstar]

I think netbooks have become an evolutionary dead-end, ousted by the tablet and the ultrabook. Laptops are falling in price anyway, and a linux system can be installed on a bare bones laptop to achieve the same result.

The only thing is size. My wife's Lenovo Ideapag U160 is about the largest I would ever have for myself, and I mean the footprint rather than the thickness, even then I think I would prefer a smaller screen, but still with a decent resolution.

[Noxvayl]

Grammar checker: "... since their introductory years and now, ..."

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Netbooks became a dead end because,of their crappy IGPs. If they had better IGPs,the market would still have existed - this is entirely the fault of Intel,who didn't want to put better IGPs in most Atom based netbooks.

[Lucio]

Netbooks became a dead end because,of their crappy IGPs. If they had better IGPs,the market would still have existed - this is entirely the fault of Intel,who didn't want to put better IGPs in most Atom based netbooks.

I'd have said it was more the take off of the tablet market that led to the netbook's demise, particularly when you include models like the Asus Transformer available.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I'd have said it was more the take off of the tablet market that led to the netbook's demise, particularly when you include models like the Asus Transformer available.

The reason people stopped buying netbooks,is because many bought them before and found them useless for doing things like watching video. Atom sales have dropped like a brick(AMD has taken a decent amount of marketshare from Atom worldwide when it comes to netbooks). I told people at the time they were not a good idea down to the rubbish IGP,which could not decode video properly and even the Ion netbooks were expensive. Intel did this as they did not want CULV sales affected. If the netbooks even had the GMA4500 IGPs from the beginning,they would have been much better devices,as things like flash video could be decoded by the IGP.

Hence,people ended up with paperweights which got hardly any use and avoided netbooks after that. Instead they either spent more and bought cheaper laptops,and when affordable tablets came on the market it was the end. Remember,for a long time you were paying £300+ for even an entry level laptop or tablet which is more than the cheapest netbooks.

[Biscuit]

i think AMD could still make some ground with their low power chips like the Brazos, and i think the reason why is very much what CTF has outlined. The GPU is so much more important than it used to be.

I recently replaced my laptop with an AMD E450 based sub-notebook (lenovo x121e) and the form factor is perfect, performance is just about enough, battery life is brilliant.
It was still quite expensive at £350 though