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Comment by fuball63 | Hacker News Reader

I recently found my old netbook while going through some stuff. The netbook trend was short lived, but I really like this machine (Acer Aspire One ZG5). Ethernet and card ports, plenty of USBs. And it has VGA, which for some reason I still have more use for than HDMI. They keyboard and mouse were better than my current laptop, a Lenovo Yoga 2 that I can't seem to get the hang of. And it has an Atom processor and really good battery life.

Sadly I slipped on ice in a parking lot and broke the screen. I ordered a new one on ebay a few days ago, so hopefully I can revive it.

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I have very fond memories of my old Asus Eee PC 1000 netbook (see https://www.computerworld.com/article/2532501/mobile-wireles...).

I miss netbooks. It’s too bad that we let Intel and Microsoft kill them.

I remember when Eee PC's came out and all the buzz about them. What do you mean by Microsoft and Intel killed them? I just assumed it was lack of market interest.

In my experience, they were abruptly killed. I remember when Asus pulled everything days after releasing a new model. Something happened, because I wanted to buy one, and then they mysteriously disappeared. HP is about the only company making them now.

Microsoft hated netbooks because they ran on Linux and low-spec older versions of Windows, rather than the latest full-price versions. Intel hated netbooks because they used low-end, low-margin Atom CPUs.

Microsoft's response was to put a variety of netbook-gimping restrictions on the things they allowed OEMs to do if they wanted to be able to sell machines with Windows preinstalled. Some of those tactics are recounted in this 2009 article from PC World: https://www.pcworld.com/article/169919/5_netbooks_microsoft_...

Intel's response was to develop and drive OEMs to the competing Ultrabook (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook) standard, which kept the netbook's focus on "small and light" but replaced the "inexpensive" part with premium materials and full-fat Core processors.

The release of the iPad put the final coup de grâce on the netbook market, but its success there was driven at least in part by the ways MS and Intel had forced OEMs to kneecap their netbook products in order to stay in good graces with the two companies you absolutely had to be in good graces with to make any products (netbook or otherwise) in the PC business.

They were also unfairly crippled because of the drive to be ultra-cheap. I think that hurt them in the market.

Netbooks became amazingly better with a bit of a RAM upgrade to 4 GB,a real SSD, a real Debian installation and a light-weight window manager.

The Atom CPU is slow, yeah, but CPU speed does not matter for most things. I can run a 2017 Dell or Lenovo laptop locked at 800 MHz and hardly notice unless I have to compile something. Having enough RAM and fast IO matters much more.

I think there was a lot of market interest in Eee PCs which quickly dried up after people got them home and realized how bad they were. An extra $200 in cost would have made it a much better experience. Of course, some of that market interest was just from being cheap, so I dunno.

I still use a fanless NC10 to run an IRC bot after a few years lent to my parents for writing emails. Removed the dead battery, replaced the disk with a small SSD and set it to power saving so it never goes above 60ºC while being completely silent. Best bang for the buck I've had with hardware.

I still have a Dell Mini 9. Everything still works apart from the battery which doesn't last long. I recently built a very minimal Gentoo on there and it's very quick. I use it as a coffee table computer in my living room.

I got the Dell Mini 10v and I think it's still my favorite machine of all time. I've dj'ed several weddings with it, using mocp. It was the only machine I used in grad school. That was a truly righteous machine.

"The netbook trend was short lived"

It's still ongoing. We just call them Chromebooks nowadays.

Chromebooks don't offer the freedom that a regular netbook does, though. Last time I looked, it seemed like a real pain to get your own OS or dev environment on.

But I agree it's the same concept for what was the original intention of a netbook.

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