I have a 10.1″ HP Mini 1000 that meets my requirements exactly, but Scarhawk knows a ten year old girl who proves me wrong.

Dave Winer is exactly right.

DGF

In my day to day work (a Sysadmin for a Windows/Cisco-Based Gov entity) I’m constantly called on to run from location to location and have something that works natively in the environment so I can replicate user problems/etc. The Macbook really doesn’t do this for me very well. I’m afraid of breaking it and compared to a netbook it’s rather heavy. Most of my apps are cloud/network-based so the Macbook seems overkill for work most days.

What advice would you give someone like me who is looking to try a netbook?

For a start you are not suppose to work on netbooks. Netbooks are essentially a toy, a portable gadget meant to be thrown in a bag when you go out shopping and taken out again when you stop for a coffee so as to catch up with your email, read the latest post on the blogs you are following, or do a bit of surfing. Notice the “Net” IN NETbook?

Also as for memory size, linux runs beautifully on this small devices. Just because Microsoft cannot/will not produce an OS that fits such small hardware requirements is no need to think that the netbook market will die out. Conversely, you could argue that Microsoft has missed a trick with not producing a netbook specific OS. Google’s new browser centric OS seems to be a perfect fit for the growing netbook market as essentially that’s all you need, everything else is, as they say, “in the clouds.”

Everyone would rather do work on a bigger screen, if they can afford it, find room for it, and/or deal with carrying it around. The reasons to want a small screen are cost, weight, battery life. Productivity goes down on a smaller screen no matter what you’re doing.

I will squash the price comparison between netbooks and notebooks. You don’t know the difference? Okay, go rent a notebook, say 13 or 14″, then go rent an 11 or 12″ netbook. Guess what? The difference between NETBOOK and NOTEBOOK is PORTABILITY. Got it? Light and small = netbook. Notebook = heavy (small is debateable, but go ahead and pack around your extra couple pounds). I’m sure we all thought the original iPod was pretty cool. Want to compare that to a Nano? Same applies to computers. Deal with it. Netbooks are no longer limited. It’s only the users bias that limits the experience or courage to try a netbook.

Think of portable computer design as a triangle, with a customer demand at each corner: Price, Power, Portability. (“Power” here meaning “computing power” — fast CPU, lotsa memory, big HDD, etc.)

These demands conflict with each other enough that you can have two of them, but not all three. Adding capacity in one corner tugs the design away from the other two.

Before the netbook came, consumers had two choices:

* Optimized for Portability and Power — think Sony Vaio, super slick, super fast, super expensive
* Optimized for Power and Price — think generic HP $800 laptop, cheap but using desktop parts that make it bulky and hot

The netbook filled a gap by optimizing for Price and Portability — the previously unserved corner of the triangle. To get there, it sacrificed Power, but the key insight the netbook designers had was that for a large segment of the market, who do Web browsing, email and light office tasks, even the most low-end machine imaginable with today’s hardware had sufficient Power. And nobody was making systems for those people.

Of course, now that the market has been established it’s filling out with machines that trade some Portability or some Price for some extra Power. But the key difference between netbooks and notebooks is that for netbooks, Power will always be the least important consideration.

(More thoughts on this subject here, to avoid lengthening an already herniated comment: http://www.jasonlefkowitz.net/blog1archive/2008/07/history_repeati.html )