Netbooks

The proliferation of smartphones, later on tablets, made them obsolete and anyone who wants a computer will pony up for a proper one

Turns out Windows is incredibly bloated and doesn't run well on these small machines. You install something like a BSD and suddenly it's blazing fast

I had one with 2 GB, was a pain... I ended up Debian on 16 gig SD-card. Good thing it could boot from USB

Netbooks didn't fail, in fact they're thriving now with latest Intel Gemini Lake CPUs

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Dude, laptops just got smaller and got rid of optical shit

>flash was lightweight
okay zoomer

The problem is if you're looking purely by screen size. If you check the overall measurements you'll find that with the bezels shrinking you can pick up a 11-12" screen in a same size machine as your old 9-10" netbook.

People switched to smartphones, "ultrabooks" and tablets.

>t was a marketing gimmick
Not even that, it was simply cheaper to put a tiny flash chip in it than a HDD. Remember, it ran a custom linux distro that people weren't supposed to install any extra programs onto anyway

Too slow for facebook. That's really it.

>Ugh it takes forever to load facebook on this thing

Smartphones getting larger screens and becoming more mature tech was the final nail in the coffin.

I still have an EEE 900 with a faster quasi-SSD soldered in. It still works despite being used 24/7 for years in a pretty shitty environment.

why is tere no netbook sized (8 to 10 inch) full power notebooks though

iToddlers

>and they used spinning hard drives.
Or worse, a low capacity eMMC

14 inch screen is not a netbook

had an eee pc 1001px which came with an hdd and 1gb ram, it was barely usable with the win7 installation it came with

even after i upgraded to an ssd and maxed out the ram to a whopping 2gb it was struggling under windows and it was only passable with the lightest of linux distros

They came with lightweight Linux distros installed. But people installed Windows and bloated office suites and were suddenly displeased with the performance.
It's like you get a moped instead of a SUV, then get pissed because it's hard to shop furniture and kitchen appliances with it.

Because modern netbooks are garbage powered by atoms or celarons and have 32gb of storage and 2gb of RAM.
Best ultraportable device options at the moment seem to be the GPD Pocket or Surface Go, unless there's anything else in a similar range?

I'm very tempted to get either device myself, would be great to have something i can take in a book bag maybe with an external battery for some extra juice.

They died because tablets just make more sense for 95% of applications in a world where every website has a version optimized for mobile platforms. If you need more computer than a tablet can provide, laptops have shed 2/3 of their weight and made huge battery life gains.

It was. You think Animation and flash games caught on in the early 2000s because they required 2GB of memory and 3GHz processor?

That Eee PC form factor with today hardware would be so fucking dope

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because the hardware was too simple to properly support botnets so they killed them.
later model eeepcs had upgradable ram and removable storage, as well as a stock bios so they ran any distro well.
I used a PX1001 as my main PC for 2 years with no major issues other than integrated graphics being too slow for PS1 emulation. Still played a shit ton of VNs though.
using a MIPS netbook with open or net bsd is apex computing.

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Facebook is laggy in chromium, m.facebook.com is a workaround. You can play HD h264, but only up to 720p and about youtube quality. Youtube works but it's easier to use an external player.

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>GPD Pocket or Surface Go,
can't think of much else apart from the lets note series which are expensive and unobtanium in the west

Netbooks were always the answer to a small niche problem that only lasted for at most, 5 years. People wanted a smaller, lighter laptop which also meant associated battery life. But then hardware caught up. Now we we're able to jam a shit load of hardware into a small package with a minimum of heat/battery usage.

And the Chromebooks came along and fist fucked the entire market.

Just get a tablet with a keyboard dock.

Also, the original EEE PC series (70x/90x) had one of the worst keyboards on any post-2000 laptop ever.

The shift key on the 1000 models is pretty bad, but I actually like the home, end, pg up, pg down.

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Fucking this.

The original eeePC could run a lightweight linux distro amazingly well. Atleast for me, the problem with these laptops was that the keyboards are too fucking small to type on and they were really uncomfortable too. It's OKish for short usage, but after ~20minutes it becomes such a PITA.

I still got my eeePC 701. The screen is too small to use Windows. The 901 is the smallest screen you would want really.

Well yeah, scrolling through stuff with the arrow block is the only thing you can sort of comfortably do on that keyboard. Typing is a pain because you constantly inadvertently push backslash, enter or up, and the only implementation of F-keys that was worse than this was the much-maligned gen2 X1 Carbon.

I had one of those EEEs that omitted the kind-of-usable soldered 4GB SSD and had only an incredibly bad Phison drive in the faux-mSATA slot, which choked XP and Linux alike. But once I nigger-rigged a faster drive in there with some spaghetti wires, it could even run Win7.

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>Atom housefire
You don't know what you're talking about. I've had an atm laptop from 2013 and it was something like 3w tdp, passive cooling only. Never hot.

I can't stand 4GB of RAM nowadays, let alone the mother of all swap that was 1001px

Had installed an ssd ot it once the hard drive died.

I used it to watch 720p porn on mpv (vlc was lagging) before its battery stopped charging (I might have destroyed it trying to restore it afterwards but I still have it lying somewhere)

okay, but Atoms before Bay Trail were basically unusable.

The first Atom-based EEEs had a 2.5W Atom CPU but a 7W chipset. Intel at the time wanted Atoms to be ultra cheap first, everything else second, leading to some hilarious shit like mITX boards that combined a 4W Atom with an ancient 22W chipset.

Jesus christ this shit.
I had a Acer netbook that was just like the Atom EEEs and it shocked me when I found out about the chip set. The fact that in the Dx11 era it shipped with the dx 9.0b GMA950, that thing can't even do hardware T&L, a fucking GeForce 2 can do that.
I was't expecting it to be a gaming machine by any means, I bought it for taking notes, but some of the hardware in it was just bizarre.
Still have that piece of shit laying around, not sure what to do with it.

Starting with Pineview, Atoms were fine for stuff like POS machines and signage - other passively-cooled x86 CPUs at the time were ancient Geodes and Edens that were an order of magnitude slower.

It's not like DX11 would've helped given its performance. I had an AMD E-350 that was more or less a dual core Atom but with better graphics, I still couldn't play anything worthwhile on it.

Would have helped for making it a little streaming box. But since it was Dx9.0b it litterlaly could not do any decoding on hardware so the first gen single threaded, single core, in-order exicution, 512kb L2 cashe Atom CPU had to do all of the work. That thing STRUGGLED to render 480p youtube videos in the Flash era which was more forgiving them the HTML5 decoding of today on CPUs.

I've got a second netbook that has a AMD C-10, its a pile of shit too but at least its dual core and has USB3. Makes for a nice little low power syncing server and VPN middle man device.

They're called Chromebooks now

Yeah I think they came just in time when internet started to become more and more bloated.
I distinctly remember I had to ditch Firefox for Chrome for the first time back then because it crashed the whole damn thing when out of memory while Chrome crashed just the current tab.

Memory was a big problem in netbooks, and that was basically an artificial limitation - Microsoft didn't allow XP ULCPC to be licensed for computers with >1GB of memory, while Vista and later 7 were too bloated and expensive.
Sony's P-series had 2GB of RAM and Vista, but that made the models that had 4200rpm HDDs completely unusable - just starting up took like 5 minutes and ate 10% of battery.

The Vaio P was such a fantastic form factor, i'd love to see something in the same kind of chassis, but maybe squeeze a 21:9 display in there and a Y-Series processor. (probably an awful idea in reality)

A fast ssd. That really makes a difference

>The fact that in the Dx11 era it shipped with the dx 9.0b GMA950
asus tried to solve this problem in later models by adding nvidia ion hardware to their eee pc line

by then it was of course too late but even then it could only support dx10

So, once again, Microsoft is the reason we can't have nice things.
Sad.

They tried to create a fad with $100 loss-leaders but no one bit and continued to buy Netbooks when they went to $400-500.

Compared to JS garbage.
I remember I was waiting for HTML5 (iPad 1 era), I was expecting 480p (HQ back then) videos on EEEPC, but shit was more laggy, than flash

I had original 45nm Atom, shit was hot, and shit was slower, than 900Mhz Celeron.

>failed
They are called "Chromebooks" and "Ultrabooks" now. Some of them are even cheaper than first gen netbooks.

Macbooks are expensive because normies love them. Same as expensive quartz watches.

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They didn't though. We still have shitloads of them around and always did.

now THOSE were laptops. *sips* yup, they don't make em like they used to

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>Netbooks had a slow and shitty CPU, their GPUs couldn't even decode HD video (They need aditional cards to do that) they didn't had enough RAM and they used spinning hard drives.
>Even Windows XP feel slow in these pieces of shit.
It's not like the manufacturers were in control of what hardware to put in their netbooks.

>They are called "Chromebooks" and "Ultrabooks" now. Some of them are even cheaper than first gen netbooks.
Chromebooks are only useful if you don't want to get anything done. Or live in 3rd world country. I have a high powered ultrabook, it's light, yes, but as big as my T540.

I've using a netbook since 2013, it's one of those with AMD APUs. It's not so bad, I run firefox + emacs + ghc + smplayer and don't have problems

During the heyday of these (2008-2010ish) it was a good option for a $200-300 thing that could connect to the internet and have a battery life of more than five hours. Core 2 Duo had ultra-low-voltage processors that were like 10w and went into MacBook Airs and things like the Thinkpad X300 but those laptops cost a fortune.

When Core i came along and started having good performance at low wattages like 15W and under, netbooks became a relic of the past. That and nobody really likes using a 10.1" or smaller screen on actual computers

>Chromebooks are only useful if you don't want to get anything done. Or live in 3rd world country.
That's exactly who netbooks were marketed to. That and middle-class moms who needed to look up recipes on Food Network.

>That's exactly who netbooks were marketed to. That and middle-class moms who needed to look up recipes on Food Network.
Ok got me there. The fact they are underpowered is the companies' fault - they could've built them better. Look at the GDP pocket, for example, I would buy one if it came in a netbook size. All ask for is an m2 slot, replaceable SSD/HD, upgradeable ram.

#sonyvaio now that was a laptop

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In my mind i really want a extremely portable computer that i can take, in theory, anywhere. That i can browse the internet, play a few games, that i can put my PDFs and make notes during game night and juice up with a battery pack if needed. Maybe play a quick game while on my lunch break or whatever, or on the train.

And while an iPad could quite realistically fulfil most of this... I kinda want to have the capacity to access my PC software, is that silly and frivolous?

They were slow, awful and not worth the tiny amounts of money you might've paid for them. They were straight garbage.
And the 12-inch MacBook is actually surprisingly powerful, so it gets a pass.

Fuck intel for never releasing WDM drivers for GMA900

I installed Lubuntu on my Foxconn SZ901 and it works great!

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Look into the Asus E203.

My most used machine is an Acer ao522. 1ghz dual core and c-50, 4gb of ddr2 ram, and a 500gb SSD. It's pretty much shit for everything except basic browsing. Even YouTube at 480p stutters and desyncs.

I also own a tf100(bay trail atom, but only 2gb of ram and 64gb of emmc memory) and 11e(celeron 2970, 8gb of ram, 500gb Samsung ssd) but I don't use them much since I want to get the ao522 to the breaking point before I swap in one of the better machines.

Nah. It's a niche desire, but a desire that does exist, as seen by the existence of modern UMPCs like the stuff GPD puts out. I personally went with the Win 2, which is okay to type on and use like a normal computer while having a great gamepad and being small enough that I can tuck it into a pocket.

So what laptop should I get? I carry a 15" one for work but want something really compact and light that doesn't need to be super powerful for personal stuff, basically a netbook.

thinkpad x220

why an x220 over a 240 when there's basically no price difference?

>I've got a much newer processor that has the same name, there's no way the older ones were worse

Didn't they die out basically at the same time tablets became a thing?

If you want a crummy little thing that can only just barely be used for productivity, you might as well get one of those.

Tablets don't have keyboards, and don't even try recommending a fucking convertible with a snap on keyboard

There's also the fact that older netbooks also tended to be smaller and lighter than most tablets today...alongside running desktop operating systems that do everything Android does and more

Cellphone operating systems on tablets are such a fucking joke. Dual-boot, sure, it's nice to have all that touchscreen-ready software, but if it can't also run a desktop OS it's absolute trash.

I'm well aware, but I think for the average consumer, there's just no room between a proper 13 inch laptop and a tablet for the netbook to fill, and that's why they've died out.

First EeePCs were leftovers from Computers for Niggers initiative and were produced at cheap without any concern for productivity.
Apparently white people got used to another experience and were willing to pay more to at least watch YouTube.
Tablets and Ultrabooks are essentially the next generation.

netbooks didnt take off cause of a combination of shit hard ware with a shit OS and shit peripherals
that made them horrible to use.

first, the screens were shit. 640x480 was got tier on older comuters, but despite having more pixels, the combination of the abhorrent widescreen aspect ratio with limited space led to 1280x720 screens having an unuably high ppi on an OS that did not support that kind of scaling (remember that microsoft required 1024 vertical pixel and imposed the corresponding 1366 standard widescreen on the industry) - resulting in everything either being unreadably small or just incapable of fitting on screen.

second, the fucking keyboards and touchpads were abominable. a small amount of perspiration made them unusable, and they never registered touch to click, unless it was to steal focus away from what you were in the middle of typing.
they keyboards deleted half or more of the non-querty keys, so you had to memorize horrible keycombos to input anything, to the point where fucking PDAs were more pleasant to type on.

and windows past xp was way too bloated for shitty hardware. linux+netbook was a great combination, but consumers expect windows in a laptop formfactor, so manufacturers had to make these sorts of shitty compromises

tablets let manufacturers ditch windows in favor of android - an os designed for shit hardware, shit screens, and shit key entry.
if you slap android x86 on one otf these old netbooks, its unironically a better experience than the default, not to mention having a physical keyboard, even if its a shitty one, is really nice.

Personally i think it's worth paying a little extra, above the traditional Netbook mark, for something with a nicer screen, better build and a bit more performance.