WIRED magazine's March 2009 issue has a really interesting article on netbooks-- those small, light, and cheap laptop computers that are rising in popularity (15 million sold late 2007-2008, or 7% of all laptops sold worldwide). Here's some info from the article:
$300, not $1,000 like a standard laptop. How?
-Flash memory, not a hard drive
-Open-source Linux operating system, not Microsoft XP
-4GB of storage, not ~80GB as is standard in a laptop.
In short, you have a small notebook computer that can't store hardly anything. But it does do the internet, with wireless capabilities that are the same as a laptop.
2 interesting trends that netbooks push forward:
1) Base-of-the-Pyramid Design Cycle, where innovation trickles up.
The cost-saving technology in netbooks was conceived for One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). MIT's Media Lab, which is driving OLPC to deliver computers to children in resource-strapped countries like Rwanda, contracted the Taiwanese firm Quanta to manufacture the devices. Quanta's competitor Asustek (also based in Taiwan) caught on and started making adult-style low-cost laptops, and middle-class consumers are buying them up. Now, US companies like Dell are forced to develop netbook lines to penetrate markets like China and India, and it's a wonderful way for consumers in those regions to enter the computer market.
2) Showtime for Cloud Computing.
Because storage space and processing power are so small, just about the only think you can use netbooks for is the internet. Yet since most of what I use my computer for is internet-based (emailing, blogging, Facebook-ing, even word processing now on Google Docs), then the quality of my experience depends on the performance of machines external to my personal device. As long as I have a good internet connection, I can get away with buying a cheap computer.
Personally, I'm excited by what netbooks are doing to open up PC access for much of the world; if I didn't already have a work computer and a home computer that function fine, I'd consider getting one. 2 things that might stop me: First, I download PDFs and pictures to my hard drive all the time. There are cloud-based services like Dropbox which can step in, so netbooks should integrate smoothly with web-based file storage in order for users to find them convenient. Second, there are still several programs I need that would prevent me from switching over completely. Yet article predicts that more and more powerful functions will be available on the cloud, letting people switch to internet-based programs to do things like video-editing online the way Writely (now Google Docs) lets you do word-processing online. Looking forward to what will come next.
