Reminder that with Windows Starter Edition you couldn't change your wallpaper. Has there ever been a more arbitrary limitation in any software than that? The low powered Atom processors and iPad/tablets didn't help Netbooks, but it was clear Microsoft never took them seriously.
They were cheap and were bogged down really quickly with anything more than web browsing. The real purpose wasn’t really clear which lead to their eventual demise. Nostalgic nonetheless.
@billy ruiz bit different though because when you buy a laptop or pre-built PC it'll be activated. With Windows Starter you were buying a netbook, and were basically punished for not buying something better. Also it’s now used to try to guilt you into actually buying Windows which is probably fair.
At around 2012 I was given my mum's laptop which was a packard-bell easynote with black shiny plastic, it was a full size laptop but it had an awful single core celeron and I barely remember the rest, however it had windows 7 starter and it heated up like crazy. Why 7 starter? no idea at all, but packard-bell was a cheap brand so if it had to be cheap, it had to be completely garbaged out.
@@coolbean9880 Well I mean yeah. Just look at Apple (and granted apple products aren't "bad", but easily their success comes from the brand recognition and "if you don't have an iPhone you're poor"). Not to mention Google has pioneered the "non thinking" internet age by controlling search results, ads, and general stimuli exposure. Then there's the rest of the internet and big companies making it worse. Not to mention the education curriculum that's focused on just passing kids and getting them out of school (usually meaning all most people learn anymore is how to follow directions). Brand recognition is the name of a very fixed game right now.
@@vullord666 about schools, unfortunately that depends on your teachers. I was lucky enough that almost all of my teachers placed a heavy emphasis on teaching critical thinking, and, in my science classes, experimentally testing the concepts we were learning (including math classes, arguably my best teacher, assigned proofs/fewer but longer form problems for homework as well as some shorter practice). Of course, the one who didn’t (second semester of trig lmao) was awful, and I had to essentially give myself extra homework to actually learn the material.
I have a chromebook that i spent 300 bucks on a couple years ago that serves its purpose. It even had a decent chip in it that i could setup a linux partition and android apps. And now its a great little laptop to let my son use with a child family account.
I had a netbook in college, and I still have it. I ran Debian on it and it could handle anything I threw at it: databases, virtual machines, photo editing, even gaming if the game was well-optimized. The latest version of Debian still works perfectly on it. The biggest limitation was perhaps the screen resolution, which was 1024x600. Many apps were and still are designed with a minimum of 1024x768 in mind, meaning that the bottom of the GUI would be cut off.
@@DacLMK I run Sparky on mine. Dell Latitude 2120 with 2GB DDR3 and it does pretty good. I can run games like Half Life on it in Steam and they are perfectly playable.
@@DacLMK But why not debian or debian oldstable? You can install debian and DWM or Weston with your software. From start it consumes like 100mb, but in fact it should be less if don't count cash. AntiX and PuppyLinux seems to be good option to run from USB drive.
I sold a lot of netbooks running a pawnshop for years 😂 some were decent. HP and Acer made decent netbooks. Windows starter edition was okay. Basic web browsing. Basic word processing.
I was an on-site technology consultant; my netbook was invaluable for research, live invoicing, some basic troubleshooting, and let me tell you -- often faster than a client's PC. It was Acer, it ran Windows XP.
I don't even know where my netbook went. My mom bought one for me 'cause she didn't want me hanging out in internet cafes, but I completely forgot when I stopped using it. I do remember it being absolutely terrible in terms of performance. I wasn't even trying to play games, yet it was struggling to get it to work when I needed it to.
I had one from my grandma it was called an Eee Pc made by ASUS with windows 7, and it took 50 years to do anything. We won't talk about what happened when it upgraded to windows 8.
@@fenn_fren my mom also had an asus eee pc, same experience, but we never upgraded to windows 8. Anti-virus software was the biggest performance killer. She gave it to me and now it has an ssd and Linux mint and now it boots within 10-20 seconds and I can actually use it. On a side note, without the hdd, the screen is to heavy for the eeepc so it won't stand correctly. I was lucky I had an old ssd that was as heavy as the hdd that was in the eeepc.
I have an HP Netbook I got in early 2009 for only $200 with a nice case. It was good for travelling and internet and light use. It was one of the first ever computers with an SSD (albeit the capacity was so small I barely had enough room for the OS and updates, lol). I actually think it worked reasonably well for internet and basic functions. I used it on occasion for many years until the battery stopped holding a charge and it just couldn't keep up well with the latest web sites. I think the biggest issue many people had (as with many things) is that they thought/hoped it would be good enough to be their main computer, which it obviously wasn't meant to be.
People forget that Windows 7 at launch was incredibly bloated and almost reached "Crysis" status. Vista also had that, due to different reasons, but most people ignored it and still used XP. So a Starter version made sense. What didn't make sense, as you pointed out, is stripping everything, even background changing. The last netbook my family ever got was exactly around the time it came with the Starter Edition.
There were some 11.6 inch netbooks that actually came with Core i5 and Core i7 ULV processors like the Acer TimelineX 1830T, although it costed $699 when it came out.
I loved my WinXP EeePC to death. It was _extremely_ portable, then and even now, had a usable keyboard and great battery life. I used it for writing/note-taking and as a music player (just add headphones and you get a great if chunky iPod). Superb for the price.
I had a netbook around 2010-2011. Really wasn’t so bad. I found it more useful than an iPad of that era, and it cost like half as much. Also, I found a 3rd party application that let me change the wallpaper on Windows 7 Starter.
I actually still have my netbook. It's in the kitchen right now. It's from Asus. I was able to boot from a thumb drive and put Linux on it. It's not a speed demon, by any means, but with a USB mouse, it's good enough to use Google Docs on the go. I used to take it with me all the time to my writers' workshops.
Loved it. It was small, fitted great in my suitcase or carry bag and so I took it over the world. The problem was that it could not take much damage, so it broke and then I never replaced it.
Wait! Netbooks? I always thought they were called Notebooks and I used to have one HP with touchscreen and a pen, the screen rotate 180° so you can use the pen comfortable. Can’t remember the name, but it was very small
"Notebook" is just a synonym for Laptop, just as Netbook is a (low-end with built-in networking) Laptop. Marketers like to differentiate things to increase sales & excitement, but there's rarely anything important behind their PR.
I had the HP one that rotated 180° but wasn't touchscreen circa 2012, the hinge was absolute garbage, my dad must have slapped gorilla glue on it like 20 times. IIRC the power supply or the hard drive or something gave out a couple of months in and it had to go back to hp to get fixed. Then against my better judgment I replaced it with another HP netbook circa 2015 which was at least durable but only by virtue of being so laughably underspecced that it would never wear out. I think I payed like 300 euros for it and probably most of that was the SSD at the time. Actually no, I had forgotten about the time a whole column of the keyboard just gave up working like 2 months in when I was in a foreign country and couldn't easily send it back to get it fixed. So as a student I was pasting in characters to write essays, it was wild. Speaking of the SSD it was 32Gb, so more like 28, and the OS alone took up 20 of that. You could not change or upgrade the SSD or RAM because both were soldered to the motherboard (2Gb RAM in 2015 was already low and borderline inappropriate for Windows). That one actually would have done quite well with Linux but I never bothered. As someone old enough to remember computers where everything was modular this rubs me the wrong way. You'd buy a shitty "cheap" computer yes and then when you could afford it you upgraded parts, that's how it always used to work. Like the only difference in design between this laptop and the 500€ one is that you could actually change the parts when technology and your budget got to that point. Like, I did buy these laptops for a reason because I was a broke student, and the joke *is* on me for actively buying HP a second time after swearing to myself I never would. But when what you're selling is that arbitrarily shitty (see Windows Starter) it ends up feeling like a slap in the face.
I bought an Acer Aspire 1 (model ZG5) in December of 2008 (actually bought one for my wife too. Xmas presents), over the years I upgraded the memory to 2GB and put a 128GB SSD into it. Still on XP-SP3. I still use it today, not for the internet, but as a printer server, a scanner server and to back-up my NAS to a couple of big HDDs. It get's the job done and with the extra memory and the SSD it runs XP like a trooper.
I've had a new netbooks - strictly EEEs, beginning (I think) with a 701, moving on to a 900/901 and I think the last one I used was something like a 1015PX. I still absolutely adore the form factor; even if the keyboard is cramped I love having a physical keyboard, kind of rugged shell and portability. I've always had a soft spot for tiny machines, and the portability+ruggedness were just icing on the cake. If these old machines were able to run the modern web, google docs etc, then I'd probably still be using one from time to time. Though I 100% agree they were marketed way too broadly. People thought they were getting a real laptop. I knew what I was getting into: Some word processing, some spreadsheets, some web browsing and IRC:ing. And possibly some light emulation action and coding if I were careful. I'd love something with the same form factor as a 901 or 1015PX but with modern hardware. Maybe an ARM cpu and some decent graphics chip. I'd be OK with android, as long as gdocs ran well.
the eeepc 701 was my first laptop and it got me through college! I got the Linux version and eventually installed xp. it was actually faster than most cheap full sized laptops because of the SSD. I'd say it was the precursor to the the modern Chromebook in terms of use case (at least for me)
I'm a netbook fan. I know I'm in the small minority, but I bought an Asus EEE PC 900HD XP edition for my 8 year old daughters' 1st computer, and she absolutely loved it. Perfect device for it's time and it served her needs very well. Since then, she has moved on to bigger and better computers. I still have her netbook as a memento. I fired it up recently and it still works great, although the buttons and keypad are worn down. I use it as an classic emulation device for 16 bit systems.
There were a wide range of them. I had a fairly expensive Aspire 1810tz, which was really great for its time. Then it fell to the floor and the screen broke and by that time, replacing the screen would cost more than buying another laptop, so. Still useful as a server though. :)
A netbook - Acer Aspire One AOA110 - free gift in local gardening store chain when my dad bought there a new loan mover - was the first piece of computing electronics, that was actually mine. It originally came with Windows XP Home Edition, which required some 3rd party software in order to be usable, but it was the device that got me to coding (at that time only very basic HTML and CSS and a tiny bit of BASIC) and with that to my first attempt to try an operating system other than Windows - it was a Linux Ubuntu 11.04. I loved it for these experiments, when I already had a better and bigger laptop, I knew, that if I were to soft-brick it or something, it was still a device for free. I ran on it several Linux distros, Chromium OS, Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 (even though the last two according to their requirements shouldn't have run on this netbook) and even tried (although unsuccessfully) to install Hackintosh 10.6 Snow Leopard. I don't have a particularly strong feelings to it (even though I still have it), but I'm really glad I got to own it.
That's the same Acer Aspire netbook I used....In the beginning, when I first used it, it was good, but when I used it more and _more_ it became slower and _slower_ .
When I was 12 my family told me they would buy me a laptop and up to a budget I could choose. Me not knowing anything about hardware limitations I wanted a netbook because I would have loved to bring it everywhere with me and be able to play video games even in school under the desk. Of course I ditched the idea and got a normal laptop when I learned that physical limitations exist and these weren't packing half the hardware normal laptops were even at the time. And it is strange how by now a cheap $100 phone heavily outmatches double the specs of the average netbook.
Since , 2014 to 2018 , had a Acer Aspire , managed in time to upgrade it to 2GB of ram , and a 120gb ssd , that thing was pretty usable back then. Good memories in 10 inches
I bought an MSI 100 Netbook for a toy to play with and for its portability. It was no speed demon, and not the best made device I ever bought, but it was reliable and the performance wasn't bad for what it was. It never let me down. I eventually converted it to a Hackintosh running MacOS and ran it in that configuration for a couple of years. I eventually installed Windows 7 (full 32 bit version) and never had a problem with it Finally, a couple of years ago, I converted it to a Chromebook running Chrome OS. It is still working in that configuration. It isn't my main machine by any measure, but I still take it out once in a while and run it. The only problem I ran into in all that time, was the battery eventually died, so now I just use the power supply plugged into the wall.
I had a Netbook, for about 2-3 years, and it worked until it got full of viruses. I liked that it was small and portable, but I replaced it with a more powerful laptop: MacBook Pro.
I loved my Samsung netbook. For the last 2 years of my undergrad I used my netbook in place of any and all books (after spending hours searching and downloading pirated copies of textbooks from sketchy Russian websites). It was very slow with XP, but I put Linux Mint on it and learned so much about Linux and optimizing it, it was actually pretty fast! I wrote my senior thesis with it. Sadly it died after I fell skateboarding. I harvested everything I could from it for parts, destroying it in the process - only to find out the issue was a dent in the power button that would effectively get the button stuck down to do a hard reset. I could have fixed it for 15 cents. Oh well! The replacement Acer netbook I got was admittedly terrible. But I loved my first netbook, like some gearhead might love an old cheap car that could be customized and tuned into something great with enough effort. Very satisfying.
Not forgetting that IBM Lenovo had a brilliant form factor out in 2006 onwards, with their Thinkpad X range of notebooks like the X61 or even the X61t that could be used as both a small slim laptop or a tablet and docked for full laptop functionality. They stopped making them a few years ago perhaps due to tablets from the competition? Shame as they were excellent machines.
At the high end of the Aspire line, they made real, full speed laptops in the same form factor. I still have one, and I sometimes travel with it since it's so small.
I've used to have Samsung N130 Netbook. It was a great device for the time. Served the purpose quite well. It was not ideal by any means, but a capable device.
I had a Toshiba NB520 way back 2012 I think. The speakers were awesome. For $300, I had no regrets. Fast enough for 4-5 tabs opened in Chrome while PowerPoint or Word is also opened.
I used to have a HP 110 and it was amazingly good on my high school/college life I used to travel cities to go to school and having a tiny laptop that did the job saved me so much
I had a Netbook for a bit like 3-4 years ago. As gaming laptops do, the battery of mine died, and since electricity on trains isn't guaranteed to be there and work, I got a 20€ used Netbook, slapped a 10€ 32 GB offbrand SSD in and used it to type up assignments and do the occasional remote connection thing
In Argentina 64bit netbooks are still being delivered to students at public institutions as a part of an education program. They are fairly decent, running a linux distro developed specifically for said program (Huayra) which works great on the Celeron N4020 with 4GB of ram. They used to come with Windows 8 as well, in dual boot, but not anymore (it wasn't so good tbh and some models only had 2GB of ram). I think netbooks can be great for these kind of things, but not so much if you want a computer for general purposes running Windows 10.
Fixed one of these for a friend once, thing was nearly new just past warranty and company said it wasn't fixable. Thing wouldn't turn on, battery dead as a rock, ended up being a defective charging port.
Tell the whole story if you don't mind... Watching this video in your daily driver, then painfully loading it in the eeePC so you can say you're commenting using that...
My problem with Netbooks was for about half the price I never had trouble finding a full blown laptop that worked without the internet and ran better used on Ebay or somewhere like that. I know "used" is a dirty word to some people but by buying from sellers with good ratings I was able to get something just as good with a less cramped keyboard for less money.
You're giving Microsoft a hard time for trying to make an OS that matches a cheap OS. Changing the wallpaper is easily solved really; just use other tools. I didn't mind mine for what it was... for the most part I wanted the form factor and many had excellent connectivity compared to even modern machines. I've got three still... including an original eePC.
I had an Acer Aspire 1 first gen. It wasn’t great with a gig of ram and 120gb HDD, but I upped it to 1.5gb of ram (as it only had one dim slot occupied by 512mb from the factory and the other 512mb was soldered to the board) and a 500gb hdd. Then I used a heavily modified rom of XP with much of the bloat ware removed and honestly, it was a pleasant experience for quite a while. I actually liked it. A lot. And I used it both as is, and with external KBM at home for a less cramped experience. But I was a tinkerer that didn’t mind the fuss of connecting and disconnecting peripherals or using modified Windows roms.
I did not know, there was such advertisment in Czech Republic ( in 10:02 in video ) :) By the way I still have working Asus eeePC 1215N netbook. It costed me then ~ 400 USD in early 2012. It came with Windows 7 Home premium, 500 GB HDD and 2 GB RAM. I replaced once battery and reused RAM and SSD from trashed PC and Dell Inspiron in early 2014, since then it has 8 GB RAM and 180 GB SSD. I reused HDD as external HDD. Even today it is usable and I bring it to places where I am afraid of damaging or getting my ZenBook (from 2018) stolen.
I bought a Nokia netbook that had a 3G wireless modem built in. I bought it because I was doing consulting and wanted something I could bring with me and never had to worry about connectivity. I actually still have it, just have not used it in years. I got a consulting gig that required me to use an iPad and over time I just stopped using my netbook. The one thing I will say for the Nokia netbook is that it had an amazing battery. I could take it on a 2 or 3 day business trip and not have to bring the charger along with me. So, I got good use out of it for a bit. The 3G turned out to be superfluous. It turned out anywhere I wanted to use it ended up having WiFi. Then my phone could be turned into a hotspot. So, I would never buy something like it again.
I had a few netbooks; all of them ran XP. They were horribly slow (I put too many programs onto them, slowing them to a crawl). Then when Chromebooks came along in 2011, things changed. I bought my first 14" HP Chromebook in 2013 and it was fast, didn't need antivirus, and was great for surfing the Internet (that's it, nothing else).
i used to have an asus netbook. it had windows 8, touchscreen functions and, well, the monitor itself could be detached from the keyboard making it into a tablet. this thing got me through my uni years and died, like, 2 years after i graduated. well, "died" is a strong word. i can still turn it on, but it can barely function now.
I'm watching this video in 2021 on my purple ASUS EeePC 1025CE Flare netbook. Modded to 2GB RAM, SSD, and registry hack to show wallpapers. I use it daily to access the Internet, keeping my main desktop computer free from clutter and spyware. It's still working, and performing just fine for me.
I used a netbook for years while on submarines. They were the perfect size for cramped living: I could read books, play older games and watch movies without taking up a ton of space that laptops took at the time. Aspire One even had a community that made a unbloaded version of Windows XP that you could install and it really made the machine much better
Netbooks got me started on using Linux and also opened up the space for Chrome OS to absolutely dominate in the budget laptop and education space. Microsoft is still feeling the pain of their decisions from that era.
I still have one. I love it. My laptop was chunky heavy and battery life was terrible. So I bought a $200 netbook and carried it to school no problem battery life was 8+ hrs. I ran word, watched videos, and an emulator for old games.
A mixture of that whole unable to change the background mess and the speed suffering from how bloated Windows 7 was in comparison to Windows XP (and how mortified they looked suggesting to downgrade) was why my parents tossed the netbook they bought and got an actual laptop for my sister back then
I don't know why "buy" keeps getting mentioned. In college I bought a netbook that came with WinXP installed. I think it was a Gateway LT2000 or something around the time of the Win7 release. I'm assuming they still came with XP because it was both cheaper and faster ... Being a student the $300 or so was pretty much all I could afford. Regardless, I just installed cracked Win7 Professional on my own, and it worked great as a developer machine all through college. Sure it wasn't super fast or amazing - but it was perfectly fine for everything I needed from it.
My friend has something I'd consider a modern netbook. It's essentially a Chromebook with a very stripped down version of windows 10 on it. Only got a 32 gb hard drive. Yes, it came that way
Asus EEEpc series we're pure genius at their time. I bought my 1005HA in 2007 for college and it's still working. Brought it everywhere with me, a very robust, reliable and beautiful clamshell-like machine. Of course Windows XP (or Windows 7 Starter) where awful, but the EEEpc's run like a charm on linux lightweight distributions. Netbooks will endure and, in five years or so, will became a retro cult thing, you'll see (specially those darn cute 700 and 900 series).
"Obviously they wouldn't be able to handle the web nowadays" Here I am in 2023 posting this comment on an Asus EeePC 2101-HAB that's older than me running Q4OS (a modern linux distro) and it still works fine for lightweight web browsing
A modern small Netbook with Celeron, Ryzen APU or even ARMs by mainstream manufacturer would be nice- since the they are already making Full-size Chromebook with these Celeron and Pentium CPUs that are already underpowered comparing to a full-size Laptops.
I have a Dell Inspire MINI 10 now running Debian MATE as the OS. Yeah when it had Windows on it, it sucked, but Debian makes it useful once more. It's small enough to toss in my backpack, has "good enough" wifi for general browsing and a few small tasks when I'm on the go. Best of all, if it is ever damaged or lost, I won't care.
I had the EeePC with Linux. Used it for 1.5 year around 2010. It was limited but it did the job. Then the OS couldn't update Skype or Firefox anymore so I installed an independent distro specially made for it and got a few months out of it. No smartphone at the time so that thing was my life and blood online.
Man, I remember my sister's Acer Aspire One (blue with the droplet design). The bugger simply refused to die until the hard drive gave up. Since it was slow as hell, we took it to a recycling plant. Although I do wish I still had it, for history's sake. I also remember accidentally convincing my parents to buy my sister a Chromebook instead (I was convinced by a bunch of adverts. This was in 2012, before Word was available online or on app. Thank goodness Amazon gave us a refund, otherwise my ass would have been scolded to the moon!
they may have been underpowered as hell, but I still love the form factor of an 8 inch laptop. I would totally buy something like a ms surface in the form factor of an old netbook today if it existed.
I had a netbook. The screen was crappy with pixels so large you could see the RGB speckling of the LCD display. Not only that, but it's A4 was bogged down on bloat so hard by Windows 8 that it literally couldn't function as a netbook. Trying to open Chrome on it starts to cause lagging, and the software I needed to do my homework on it just seizes it forever requiring a force-restart. Never touched it after that terrible first impression to the point it sat in a bag until its battery bled to nothing, and what happens when lithium-ion loses all charge? Yeah, rediscovered it last year, and it was total E-waste. No way to recover its contents, what little there were anyway.
Every netbook I used was an absolute horrible experience without a Linux distro. That being said, that Dell Mini commercial with the Lollipop song has been cemented in my mind for a decade and resurfaces every once in a while. They marketed these things HARD.
Smartphones (from 2007 onwards) were the main reason for netbooks' demise, even more so than tablets, they popularized mobile, handheld computing with a lot more features than netbooks (and increased portability compared to tablets doesn't hurt either). Think of all the stuff we used to rely on desktop and laptop computers that can now be accomplished on the go with smartphones, and you get the point.
Way back when I was studying... a friend of mine ask me for help about his android studio not able to run on his laptop so I went to him and saw that its no laptop. It was a netbook with an intel atom processor. I wanted to laugh but I hold my composure told lectured him about it . just sharing
Samsung NC10 bought late 2008. Still have it, still use it, albeit it's had Linux Mint Xfce installed for a few years now because of the 2GB RAM. The only reason I don't use it more is that the batter doesn't hold charge for long any more so it ain't a portable as it was.
I used to play GTA San Andreas on my Acer Aspire one ZG5. Originally came with it's own Linux distro but installed XP on it. - The greatest companion when away from home at a seasonal summer job.
I actually still use my netbook. It is the perfect size to use on the Greyhound or train in addition to using at a library. It is true though that the first thing I did was ditch Windows and used Linux instead.
Chromebooks are what netbooks should have been. Tablets are finding themselves dying because of phones, and chromebooks are becoming way more common. Imagine a world where that £200 laptop had windows and not chromeOS.
Looking back at the netbooks. You could say they were the predecessor to the Chromebooks and tablets you're seeing today but poorly executed. I think also to the hardware and the software wasn't up to the task of what they were being asked to do. Today Chromebooks/Tablets are getting better with each new version that comes out and your phones taking the place of laptops as well. Now you got folding phones being sold as a phablet just add a multi port USB-C hub, you pretty much now have fairly competent laptop/desktop computer. We're becoming more and more mobile as a society even with the Rona smacking us upside the head every six months or so. And if storage is a concern, look to cloud storage services or large capacity SD cards to add to your USB hub.
I had an Asus Eee and I liked it pretty well. It took forever to start windows but it lasted for a good 12 hours on a full charge. I don't know how I managed to dodge Windows 7 Starter - I've always had a billion Windows keys, I might have thrown Pro on it, I don't remember.
@Lost in Black The early netbooks had *Windows XP* on them. The Windows 7 starter edition ones came out later, and performed _worse_ than previous models.
There were other issues. The netbook came around the time that people where asking where they could get an XO (the OLPC machine) from. Netbooks kind of filled that space. EXCEPT that earlier netbook designs were awful. Hinge and keyboard issues. (I was working with them at scale i.e. 1,600 devices) which rendered them mostly useless. Early SSD's had random write speed issues (saving a spreadsheet could take a few minutes). Later netbooks felt like they were just waiting for Chromebooks. Limited to 10.1" displays, mechanical hard drives when smaller but faster SSDs wouldn't have cost more, 2GB memory max. Most of these hardware limitations were a function of Intel's wanting to compete in the mobile market so were pushing for small form factor machines. As a result, the eee boxes, devices using the same hardware as netbooks but in more of a desktop form factor, were weirdly expensive. Like it was cheaper to buy a netbook and plug it into a monitor and keyboard than it was to buy a eee box. There were financial incentives to sticking to Intel's mandated form factor. They were quite good with Linux but had an expected lifespan of around 3 years. More than that and the limitations would creep up on you. Chromebooks, although SEVERELY limited (you couldn't turn off the secure/safe boot verification for example), got around a lot of those limitations. Their screens felt big (I think the earlier ones were only 11") in comparison. The SSDs made them feel a lot faster. Schools love them because it gives them an amazing amount of control. To all intents and purposes, while the user's families were paying for the machines, the schools own them (through Google's controls, they can decide which wifi networks they can connect to for example).
I liked my netbook. Some dirty so and so stole it though. I replaced it with a full size laptop. The laptop was more versatile, but I hated lugging it around.
The real reason they failed is because the people who design crap like this live in LA and Redmond and NYC where wifi is more reliable than sunlight. But to the other 99% of the USA and developed world, wireless data is something you only find in towns and along major highways. I saw one of these once in a Best Buy and wanted to try out the keyboard.. but the text editor wouldn't let me create a blank document because there wasn't any internet. So much for making a shopping list!
The tiny gpd laptops are netbooks done right yes they are not cheap but they aren't slow. I can play gta 5 on my gpd win max. yeah but they were too ahead of their time and slow and priced to cheaply because of that.
I owned an Acer Aspire One (Baby Blue) for around 5ish years and I have to say that most of the issues were touched on, although you could mitigate many of the issues with Linux as the OS. The primary cause of the issues were specs, it was only specs... If I could have the same form factor with 4GB of RAM, an actual SSD (eMMC is NOT good enough, and NOT upgradable) the thing would be absolutely red hot and perfect for its purpose. For reference its purpose for me was to watch shows while I was on bus, so my use case wasn't exactly taxing. But alas, it is what it is... RIP The Netbook, the greatest idea executed poorly.
