This link has been bookmarked by 22 people . It was first bookmarked on 25 Feb 2009, by brian rodney.
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Chris BigenhoA Wired article on the future of netbooks on the computer industry
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michael chalkInteresting article: one Taiwanese manufacturer talking about the "next billion customers" coming from places like Brasil & China. Quote from article : "Because this is the future of hardware. For a few users ..ever-more-blisteringly fast, water-cooled bo
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liam odonnellNetbooks prove that the "cloud" is no longer just hype. It is now reasonable to design computers that outsource the difficult work somewhere else. The cloud tail is wagging the hardware dog.
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What happened was something entirely different. When Asustek launched the Eee PC in fall 2007, it sold out the entire 350,000-unit inventory in a few months. Eee PCs weren't bought by people in poor countries but by middle-class consumers in western Europe and the US, people who wanted a second laptop to carry in a handbag for peeking at YouTube or Facebook wherever they were. Soon the major PC brands—Dell, HP, Lenovo—were scrambling to catch up; by fall 2008, nearly every US computermaker had rushed a teensy $400 netbook to market.
All of which is, when you think about it, incredibly weird. Netbooks violate all the laws of the computer hardware business. Traditionally, development trickles down from the high end to the mass market. PC makers target early adopters with new, ultrapowerful features. Years later, those innovations spread to lower-end models.
But Jepsen's design trickled up. In the process of creating a laptop to satisfy the needs of poor people, she revealed something about traditional PC users. They didn't want more out of a laptop—they wanted less. ...
By the end of 2008, Asustek had sold 5 million netbooks, and other brands together had sold 10 million. (Europe in particular has gone mad for netbooks; sales there are eight times higher than in the US.) In a single year, netbooks had become 7 percent of the world's entire laptop market. Next year it will be 12 percent.
"We started inventing technology for the bottom of the pyramid," Jepsen says, "but the top of the pyramid wants it too." This bit of trickle-up innovation, this netbook, might well reshape the computer industry—if it doesn't kill it first.
I wrote this story on a netbook, and if you had peeked over my shoulder, you would have seen precisely two icons on my desktop: the Firefox browser and a trash can. Nothing else.
It turns out that about 95 percent of what I do on a computer can now be accomplished through a browser. I use it for updating Twit
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Oliver MayorHT Seth Roberts
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Joe WoodThe great terror in the PC industry is that it's created a $300 device so good, most people will simply no longer feel a need to shell out $1,000 for a portable computer. They pray that netbooks remain a "secondary buy"—the little mobile thingy you get af
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Keri-Lee BeasleyNeat article about how the little guys are championing the big guys in the netbook vs laptop war - less sometimes IS more.
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Wesley FryerClive Thompson's 23 Feb 2009 Wired article on netbooks
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