Comments on: What Book?

By: Tony

Tony — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:15:54 +0000

Bingo! You get it! A netbook is a small laptop….I mean a 12″ netbook is coming out now? Come on really. Once Atom is powerful enough, there won’t be any distinction in performance.

By: Kat

Kat — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 20:48:19 +0000

Kinda with Graham here on missing your point. It seemed to me normal laptops have always been fairly big in size (my last two were widescreen, bulky Toshibas for example, and there are plenty more in that style by other manufacturers), and while you could buy them for a reasonable price, if you wanted a smaller, more portable one you’d have to cough up a lot more or settle for something like a palmtop. “netbooks” fill the gap between palmtops and laptops in size and are reasonably cheap considering. They seem to be mostly geared towards accessing the ‘net while you’re out and about (if you get the Eee PCs with Linux, for example, the first thing you’re greeted with is a load of ‘net orientated shortcuts and applications). If I wanted to do anything more (but without the clunky desktop setup), like gaming or developing, I’d want something a bit more substantial than a 10″ or less screen for a start.

As for the 160GB HDD, that’s clearly for storing all the stuff you’ve downloaded from “iTunes” to watch while on the move or wherever

By: Graham Gilbert

Graham Gilbert — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 17:36:18 +0000

Forgive me if I’m being thick here, but what’s your point? Netbooks serve a definite purpose – I have my macbook pro for “real work” and I have a dell mini 9 (running os x, but that’s another story) for travelling (when all I’ll need is email, internet and basic text editing). I have this set up for two main reasons:

1) (the main one) My 15″ MBP is just too heavy to carry around all day. The dell is just the right size for carting about all day.

2) Expense – my dell cost just over £300 when all was said and done (not including the OS unfortunately) – I’m not quite so bothered if some young vagrant decides that my dell would be better suited in their crack den than my living room than if they thought the same about my macbook pro that’s either tucked up safely at home or in the office waiting for when I need to sit down to some photoshop or similar.

And simply calling the cheaper netbooks “shit laptops” is downright ignorant. My mini 9 has a 1.6Ghz Atom, 2Gb ram and a 32Gb SSD – more than enough for a second computer for a nerd (and more than enough for the average user), and certainly plenty to run my OS of choice. Sure, some are a bit cheap and cheerful, but calling them shit because they run XP is silly – many people who are technologically adept prefer XP over Vista.

And if it ticks the boxes of email and internet (and I guess to be able to use iTunes and watch video), then why will they be disappointed? I’ve not seen too many “average people” who want to do more.