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Comment by benoau | Hacker News Reader

It actually was done in the Intel days, and it was also wildly popular -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC

I had one, but even for those days it had a mediocre screen, mediocre keyboard, mediocre CPU, and mediocre slow storage. The MacBook Neo has none of that.

I have one. They were never fit for purpose for anything beyond reading email, watching 360p Youtube (back then, not so much now), and browsing very basic sites. I guess maybe Flash games were also on the table. The Celerons and Atoms in those machines were comparable to Pentium IIIs. There's a reason the Netbook was a fad. Most people discovered they didn't enjoy using them, while they not long after discovered that they did enjoy using these fancy new smartphone thingies.

Hilarious comparison. I bought one. Unusable garbage. Tiny screen. Unusably slow. 8 second battery. Awful keyboard.

...and yet this sparked a revolution called netbooks that took over a full 20% of the laptop market at their peak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook

They sold well. In my experience working at Staples at that time, small and cheap beat any other consideration for many customers. Hard to argue with a $99 PC.

A few months later, they'd realize it wasn't working out, come back, scream at us, and buy something bigger and faster.

I really liked the MSI one I had, but I knew what I was getting into.

Yes, a ton of people bought them. Then they took them home and used them. Then they bought something else.

Now we don't really have mass-production netbooks anymore.

Part of that was incidental factors. The 701 happened partly because of a glut of cheap, standardised screens designed for that first generation of in-car dashboard sat-nav systems.

It didn't help that those screens weren't particularly good.

Even Apple made an 11" laptop in that era!

I mean, I did buy one =)

You must be joking. I had Eee PC, and it was terrible.

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