Hacker News Reader

Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

On that note, whatever happened to netbooks? As someone who writes a lot and need a mobile device to do it on, they used to be perfect. Can't seem to find the form factor anymore. Even the smallest Chromebook seems only slightly smaller than a laptop.

View on HN

> whatever happened to netbooks?

Windows Vista and Windows 7 happened to them, and Android/iOS tablets happened to their target demographics.

And notebooks got much lighter and smaller on average, compared to the netbook era. You used to need a 14" or 15" notebook with an inch worth of screen bezel to get a "full-powered" CPU and enough RAM to have a reasonable desktop experience, plus an unwieldy docking station to have enough ports to wire it up to a work place; netbooks were tempting companions to that.

Today you can get a full desktop experience (and even some fairly high end graphics capabilities) with a 13" laptop that's smaller than 11" subnotebooks and ligher than most netbooks used to be, and can fit a full keyboard.

E.g., a modern Asus PX13 is about the size of an 11" Asus eeePC, and just as heavy… but it comes with a 24-core Ryzen CPU, 32 GiB RAM, and an RTX 4070. If I'm on the move, I can just take that, instead of buying a companion device, and if I'm in the office, I can connect it to multiple daisy-chained monitors with connected peripherals using a single USB-C cable. Other Windows vendors have similar offerings.

And that's just looking at direct equivalents; completely ignoring the Apple-sized ARM elephant in the room. The M series CPUs are nuts in terms of performance, but the battery life is comparable to netbooks.

> Even the smallest Chromebook seems only slightly smaller than a laptop.

For a while companies made ChromeOS tablets to fill the gap between notebooks and Android tablets, but the higher end Android tablets these days have cannibalized that market too. And "higher end" is relative; netbook prices (400-ish dollars) get you fairly capable 10"-ish tablets from multiple vendors, complete with precision stylus and keyboard/touchpad cover. That's big enough to get netbook-tier keyboards (which were never great, let's be honest), but small enough to fit in cargo pants pockets (very handy for air travel), and the battery life is measured in days.

What I want is a modern Tandy 102. Back in the 80's these things were getting days or even weeks of use on a set of AA batteries. I'd love to see a modern version of this - a low power, highly constrained device (not running Linux), that runs on AA batteries. With modern components, you would think you could makes something like the 102 that lasts for months an AA batteries, but nobody has made one.

The closest things I've seen are the AlphaSmart Dana (discontinued), Apple eMate (discontinued) and the Freewrite line of devices.

I've thought about trying to make one myself from an Raspberry Pi, but those are not very low power and they seem to be tied to Linux (or at least I'm not aware of alternative operating systems).

https://github.com/unkyulee/micro-journal

That's pretty neat. It doesn't seem to hit the days or months of use on AA batteries constraint. That said, I didn't consider the ESP32 line of SBCs and now I'm looking into low power variants so thanks for pointing this out.

If you want low power, try the nRF52 series of chips (e.g. nRF52840). Much less power hungry than the ESP32 with a comparable ARM core. Only Bluetooth though - no WiFi. nRF52840 sensors can run for months on a single CR2032 coin cell, and the power consumption while running is lower too.

Those look great!

The industry got a lot better at making laptops thinner and screens bigger. Users liked thinner laptops with bigger screens.

For a time it was a new market, full of potential growth. Then it got mature, every one who wanted one had one and given the nature of the device (low cost/low performance) it wouldn't need to be renewed for some time. Some manufacturers went upmarket (bigger and more powerful devices for more money) blurring the line with their entry level laptops. It wasn't a recognisable market segment any more. At some point, the market must have both shrunk too much and merged into other segments for anyone to care. Mobile devices ate their lunch too I guess.

They're on eBay with absolutely cooked batteries lol. I bought an eepc for myself a while back, and a similar netbook recently for my partner, and while the batteries don't work very well, the netbooks themselves work alright with a lightweight Linux on them. I don't even bother with a desktop environment on mine.

I'm pretty sure the battery packs in both of them are just some 18650 in a trench coat, so at some point I'll probably attempt to replace them and hope I don't start a fire

You can still get netbooks or "small laptops" with 10-12" screens from Asus, Lenovo, etc. But they're not very good, definitely aimed at a budget market.

The next best thing is e.g. the Surface Laptop Go with 12.4" screens. Any higher and you have e.g. the Macbook Air.

But as another commenter pointed out, a tablet with stand / keyboard is likely the best alternative nowadays.

I had a Dell Latitude 2120 netbook for many years and I miss it. Small, decent display, good battery life, built like a bank vault. There’s nothing out there anymore with all of those properties.

It's tablet cases with bluetooth keyboard now.

Killed UMPC, then killed by iPhone/iPad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com