The netbook craze has hit the markets. The recent weakening of spending in the U.S. and other industrialized nations has had consumers looking for ways to save money, and they found the computing world's new brainchild, netbooks, and set to work eating them up.
Two articles on the subject of netbooks recently attracted my attention: Joey DeVilla's "Fast Food, Apple Pies, and Why Netbooks Suck" and Jeff Atwood's riposte "A Democracy of Netbooks". As one might guess from the titles, DeVilla sees netbooks as a fad in the marketplace, while Atwood is an all-in netbook evangelist.
However, both of these articles somewhat misinterpret the netbook issue, as most coverage of the market I have read seems to.
Lunch and Laptops
DeVilla rightly observes that the netbook is something of a compromise between full-fledged laptops and smartphones and that on a features basis there is no reason to choose the netbook over either of them.
But he ignores a vital consideration: price. Most consumers are not power users. They don't need to run Lightwave, they don't need to store 200GB of movies and music and they don't need to keep their netbooks in their pockets rather than a backpack. Most users just want something they can use to do simple tasks like email and web browsing, maybe combined with Hulu viewing and a little solitaire.
Certainly, someone who can't live without his Steam account or someone who likes to spend his free time modeling the Enterprise isn't going to be using a netbook—at least not as his primary machine.
But Grandma who just likes to check her emails is the perfect buyer for a netbook, because it does only what she needs it to.
Democracy Dud
Atwood, on the other hand, trumpets the arrival of the netbook as the realization of the cyber-utopia ideal that has lived in the dreams of many a netizen. While it's a rosy picture, and anybody who's got any right to call himself a technophile is dying for that world to become a reality (assuming no major caveats, of course), Atwood is completely overselling the netbook and turning it into a magic dream machine instead of what it actually is.
He presents these criteria, drawing them from an article on Scripting News by Dave Winer.
- Small size.
- Low price.
- Battery life of 4+ hours. Battery can be replaced by the user.
- Rugged.
- Built in wifi, 3 USB ports, SD card reader.
- Runs my software.
- Runs any software I want; no platform vendor to decide what's appropriate.
- Competition. Users have choice and can switch vendors at any time.
There are two issues with using these as criteria—I suppose they are actually two parts of the same problem—that hinder Atwood's vision here.
First, Winer's list was responding to the claim that the iPhone was Apple's answer to the netbook. Given recent developments, I'd be tempted to say that the forthcoming iSlate will be a better contender, but the point that Winer makes is that the iPhone is too underpowered and too restricted to be a netbook-class computer.
Second, if we just use these criteria by themselves, the only things that differentiate netbooks and notebooks/laptops are size and price, both rather nebulously defined. There is no price gap between high-end netbooks and low-end laptops, and with both getting very close to 11" screen diagonals at the extreme ends of their ranges the size disparity doesn't exist either.
To clarify this, I propose the following criteria for what actually should be classified as a netbook.
- No optical drive.
- Reduced storage capability.
- Optimized for battery life rather than raw performance.
- Small form factor.
- Low price.
- Integrated wireless networking.
- No vendor tethering.
Yes, quite a few of the criteria in Winer's list made it into my list. But the important things to note are the first three criteria. A netbook is intended to be as portable as a computer can be without being a handheld. That's the design paradigm.
Atwood rails against the problems of the smartphone, attacking the high costs of communications and unpleasant firmware shackling that exists in that market. However, the costs of connecting to the internet don't magically disappear just because a netbook is being used. As long as the same infrastructure is being used, the same costs will exist.
Data costs money to send. Certainly a Skype videophone call costs a lot more money to send than a text message over a cellular network—provided you send the text message through an AIM client rather than the phone's own capability.
Then, when we look at the example Atwood has thoughtfully provided us, the first thing some cursory research shows is that it is not in fact a netbook. The Acer Aspire 1410 is clearly placed in the Notebooks category of the Acer website.
The only 11.6" netbook on Acer's product listing is substantially less capable than the notebook Atwood is parading in his article.
- Single-core Atom processor.
- Windows XP
- Shorter battery life (depending on configuration)
To top it all off, Atwood never really explains how the netbook will displace smartphones in the market, just that they are apparently better than smartphones more or less because they are not tethered.
Netbooks in the Future
The netbook is neither going to become a ubiquitous feature of society nor is it going to vanish completely. The market for netbooks exists: the technologically apathetic. The relatively large chunk of society that simply wishes to go online, check emails, read the Times and maybe watch a video on YouTube will eat up netbooks. They don't need any bells and whistles, and that's fine.
On the other hand, there is an equally important segment of society that still needs higher-performance machines. Serious gaming will never make it to the netbook. Photoshop is not destined for the netbook. AutoCAD would make it explode. For users who need heavy-duty computers or large displays netbooks won't be the solution.
And netbooks most definitely will not displace smartphones. The handheld is here to stay, at least until it is replaced by some futuristic brain implant or other fanastic technology of tomorrow. Even the netbook cannot beat a smartphone for portability, and it is my estimation that we will begin to see more and more devices that are untethered in the smartphone arena in coming years.
Netbooks will simply become another piece of the market.