Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Tuesday November 06 2018, @02:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the handy-little-machines dept.

The Linux Journal reminisces about the Asus Eee and considers how close the world came to getting a GNU/Linux Desktop as a result of it being on the market. While the article is a bit light on the machinations that Microsoft carried out behind the scenes to impair their utility and cap the growth of netbook sales, especially any with GNU/Linux pre-installed, it does cover a lot of other important aspects about the netbook phenomenon. The Eee was really one of the first if not the first netbooks available. Being small and relatively inexpensive, the netbooks were not practical to use for running the slow, bloated, legacy operating systems that remain all too common among original equipment manufacturers (OEM) even today. Instead the Eee came with a good distro pre-installed and could accept just about any light 32-bit distro in its place. It is hard to overstate how popular these machines became.

It's almost impossible to believe, a decade later, how popular netbooks were in the wake of the Eee. Way past popular, actually: the netbook was the best-selling computer in the world in 2009, with seven-fold growth from 2008 and some 20 million sold. That accounted for almost 10% of the entire computer market at a time when the recession saw desktop computer sales fall 12%, the worst decline in its history.

[...] Netbooks and the Eee were so successful, in fact, that research analysts who followed Apple—whose top executives had famously called the machines "junk"—warned the company that it had better do something to compete. Mac sales fell in 2008, the first decline in five and a half years, and an analyst told Computerworld: "Vendors are waking up to the fact that people respond to so-called 'good-enough' computing. They don't really need all the power of a Core 2 Duo CPU most of the time."


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday November 06 2018, @09:26PM (2 children)

    by theluggage (1797) on Tuesday November 06 2018, @09:26PM (#758695)

    A netbook was like a real laptop, but with the cheapest, lowest-performance Intel CPU/chipset/video available, and 25% of the screen chopped off.

    All true, but (initially) they made up for that by being ridiculously, impulse-purchase cheap and got the job done for people who wanted an email, web browser and simple word processor.

    Nobody would have bought one for serious computing or even substantial office work, but they had huge potential as a second/third system, a kids computer etc. or someone who just wanted to get on email. Basically, the niche that, some years later, became occupied by tablets and large-screen phones. I got one of the original eees to play with, and then passed it on to a non-techie relative who relied on it for web and email for years afterwards.

    I think there were a few problems - first, Microsoft shat themselves (this was around the era of the Windows Vista debacle that undermined the familiarity lock-in of Windows) and threw all their weight behind getting Windows onto Netbooks, dumping a cheap "Netbook" edition of Windows XP (which they'd previously been trying to kill off in favour of Vista) on the market. Trouble is, the original netbooks barely had the grunt for Windows, so the next gen of netbooks had to be more powerful and lost the end-of-argument low price tags. Eventually, they just became entry-level Windows laptops.

    Its not all Microsofts fault, though - Netbook makers had really put the minimum effort into their Linux distributions and - beyond the basic "launchpad" and setup - not really shown any attention to detail such as tailoring the standard apps for the small screen (even simple things like turning off a bunch of toolbars by default - and with everything open-source it couldn't have been that hard to strip some of the whitepace from the dialog boxes so they fit on one screen). Also, ISTR that Asus were buggers for the "Osbourne Effect" - I never got round to buying one of the "improved" EEEs because by the time anybody had them in stock they'd announced a new one....

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07 2018, @08:24AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07 2018, @08:24AM (#758874)

    "All true, but (initially) they made up for that by being ridiculously, impulse-purchase cheap and got the job done for people who wanted an email, web browser and simple word processor."

    While I agree with all of what you are saying, there was another big advantage to the EEEPC: they are incredibly small and light. While many grumble about the small screen size, the small size and weight make them very easy to take with you anywhere. Before I bought my first EEEPC, I had a laptop given to me by my employer. Even though it couldn'the have weighed more than 10-15 pounds, and had a 12 inch screen, tops, it was like carrying an albatross around with me everywhere I went! Now, I just throw my EEEPC in my backpack and off I go. As you said, it doesn't need to do everything; it just needs to do stuff that I want to do on the go.

    • (Score: 2) by theluggage on Wednesday November 07 2018, @04:09PM

      by theluggage (1797) on Wednesday November 07 2018, @04:09PM (#759011)

      While I agree with all of what you are saying, there was another big advantage to the EEEPC: they are incredibly small and light.

      The magic combination was incredibly small and light and cheap. If you just wanted small and light you could, at the time, get something like a Sony Vaio - but probably at least 5x the price of a netbook and, although quite a bit more powerful, probably still not powerful enough to replace your main machine.

      I remember that in those days the MacBook Air (which first appeared around then) did, bizarrely, get compared with netbooks although it was really the first "ultrabook" (i.e. quite powerful laptop with a decent-sized screen and keyboard made as thin and light as possible) which wasn't quite the same thing. Of course, when Windows got pushed onto Netbooks they eventually evolved into ultrabooks and lost the original "cheap" USP.