An apple mackbook (white): cost $999, weight 5 lbs, memory 2gb, hard drive 160 gb, usb expansion slots, ethernet, wireless, bluetooth

Most Netbooks: cost $250 to $450, weight 3lbs, memory 2 gb, hard drive 160 gb, usb expansion slots, ethernet, wireless, bluetooth

For what a lot of people use a laptop for the netbooks are a great deal.

Portability: My model is the Acer Aspire One 751h. 11 screen”, and it is very light, even with the 6-cell battery.

Battery life: with windows XP I easily got 6.5 hours out of it (wifi disabled), and on Windows 7 I was able to crank that up to 8 hours by setting my max. cpu usage to 75%. I also tested wether everything still runs decently on 60% and it did, with fairly few hitches. I’m talking about a 1.33 ghz single core processor here. I have not yet tried running Ubuntu, but my guess is that ubuntu can get 9 or even 10 hours out of that battery.

Adequate system specs: here’s the main selling point for me. My HP laptop had 2 gigs of RAM and a 1.6 ghz dualcore processor. My Acer netbook has a single core Atom processor of 1.33 ghz, 2 gigs of Ram, and a below-par but windows 7-ready intel GMA integrated graphics card. Result of these “outdated” specs: a cheap, portable computer on which I can perform any task I usually do.

The problem is that most people don’t buy netbooks for that reason. They buy it to impress their friends, because it’s a gadget. They use it for a couple of weeks or months and then put it on the shelf to collect dust. If people were to start realizing that they don’t need high-end computers to visit facebook or twitter, or make a word-document, netbooks would sell even better than they already do. So far, it is only a niche product, popular with students, teachers and/or people who have to commute a lot and don’t want to carry a 6 or 7 pound, 15.4″ laptop with them every time. Of course, the economic crisis might also have something to do with the hype surrounding the netbook.

Netbooks are selling really well here in western Europe and some of the older Asus models (701, 901) can be bought for under or around €200, with XP pre-installed.

Perhaps one day, someone will solve the problem of usability with netbooks. As it is, netbook-customized Linux variations seem promising at making the best use of the small screen size and minimal capabilities (not that that’s a bad thing). If someone could solve the keyboard issue for me, I might give serious consideration to one. Until then, I’ve had no problem with my 13″ MacBook.

“I believe there’s some truth to that statement. The gist of his article is that netbooks are great, and people who don’t get that may be missing something.”

But that’s dave winer. He gets it, everyone else is missing it. That says nothing and is difficult to argue with. Remember his great prediction on Jobs returning to apple:

The idea that they’re going to go back to the past to hit a big home run .
. . is delusional” — Dave Winer, quoted by the Financial Times in 1997.

Netbooks may be great for winer, for most, they’re a toy thats affordable.

“With respect, you all seem to leave out the emotional aspect of Netbook/Notebook/Desktop.”

Fair point, but emotion plays a bit of a role in everything. For example, most Apple critics would say emotion is pretty much the only reason people buy Apple products at all. You know, it’s “cool” and they’ll buy anything with the Apple logo. We may never know the full extent emotion plays for Apple, PCs or netbooks, but I doubt it has a significant role in netbooks’ popularity.

In my view, what’s driving netbooks is price, and nothing else.

“No one dreams of the extra megahertz or extra gigs of storage”

Really? You don’t know the geeks that I know. :-)

From a specifications-based point of view, that’s entirely correct. But from a “what exactly do you need” point of view, that may prove to be entirely false. For some people, such as video pros, they do need the portability and the power and a full-fledged notebook would be the proper solution. Granted, 6+ pounds isn’t what I consider portable, but for the prosumer it’s much better than lugging around an iMac or Mac Pro (for instance).

But the average consumer? The average consumer 9 times out of 10 won’t be doing prosumer-ish things or going to play graphics-intensive games. What will they want? Portability to do BASIC things such as word processing and net surfing. Why pay an exorbitant amount for things you really don’t need on the go? Why not just get a powerful desktop and an acceptable netbook? Why pay the same amount for a clunky notebook that’s 15″ too big when you could get a small, portable netbook?

And as to hazardouspaste’s comment about them being “crappy”, what do you expect for that amount of money? I personally think their builds are OK compared to some notebooks out there today.

Have you ever used a netbook? They’re terrible in every possible way. Construction, ability to do anything even passably well…