Let’s remember netbooks – The Verge

Next week there is an Apple event and it looks like we will see updated models of iPad Pro and maybe iPad Mini.

Which is great, because it made me think of the Eee PC, which was either one of the greatest short-lived success stories in the history of technology, or a collective deception shared by a handful of tech bloggers since the end of the year. 2000, which never happened.

There were two products that arrived in 2007 that fundamentally changed the calculation: one, of course, was the iPhone. The second product, obviously more important, was the Eee PC 701. $ 399. It originally ran a custom Linux operating system that reviewers loved (Laptop MagMark Spoonauer said that it is “ten times easier to use than any Windows notebook”) and is generally advertised as a new type of computer with a massive mass attraction. Spoonauer: “Pound for lound, the best low-priced notebook on the planet.”

Again, this was a weird two-pound plastic laptop that worked a custom Linux distribution this was basically a front for different websites. (We haven’t coined the term “cloud services” yet.)

Windows was not allowed to appear on Linux, so Microsoft did some Microsoft maneuvers, and by January 2008, the Eee computer was running Windows XP. It was also part of a larger category called “netbooks” and we were all invited to know what netbooks are.

A little later, Microsoft created something called Windows 7 Starter, which was a hilarious reduced version of Windows for netbooks only – you weren’t even allowed to change the desktop background! – and the explosion of the netbook was unstoppable. My girlfriend (and co-founder of Verge) Joanna Stern built the first part of her career obsessively covering netbooks, first at Laptop Mag, then Gizmodo, and then with me at Engadget.

And there was a lot to cover: at one point Joanna noticed that Asus had come out the least 20 different models of Eee PC in 2008 single. And that was just Asus! Dell, HP, Lenovo and others have been furious at the idea of ​​the netbook. Remember when Nokia Booklet 3G reinvented Nokia? No, because he didn’t. However, it was very nice. I asked Joanna about this moment and she sent it to me:

“I was basically Bono in this video,” I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. ” Eee PC after Eee PC. MSI Wind after MSI Wind. Toshiba as it was named after Toshiba as it was called. I was constantly looking for a netbook that had a keyboard that didn’t require doll’s hands, a trackpad that didn’t leave a blister on my thumb, a hard drive that didn’t last three days to open Microsoft Word. It was a constant search for the perfect blend of price, portability and power. ”

Joanna then asked me to embed the real YouTube video of the U2 movie “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for”, which is exactly the kind of energy “wow that was really important once” that this blog post needed.

The explosion of the netbook was all the more strange as each netbook had the same basic specifications, as Microsoft paid more for a standard non-Starter Windows license if a computer had something more than an Intel Atom 1 processor. 6 GHz, 1 GB of RAM and 160 GB hard drive. So it was all the colors and sizes of the screen, really. Everything to run a deeply annoying version of Windows, on a computer that no one even remotely claimed could replace a primary PC. By the end of it all, as the chips have inevitably become more powerful, enough laptop vendors have told Joanna that their new netbook computers not bad netbooks that she started calling “notbooks.”

And then the iPad appeared in 2010, and netbooks were inexplicably such a part of computing vocabulary that Steve Jobs introduced the iPad by explicitly saying that netbooks are bad. “The problem is that netbooks are no better,” is a real thing Steve Jobs said on stage to clearly distinguish the then new iPad from netbooks. It was important to him!

He did something out of it all happen? Is this real? I remember everything, but I can’t say if it means anything or if we all thought that Microsoft and Intel are so mysteriously powerful that we had to live in their product frames and 160 GB of maximum hard disk space. Someone actually did Buy a netbook? The only people I knew who had netbooks were other tech writers; My colleague Adi Robertson appeared at a memorable exhibition both a giant gaming laptop and a tiny netbook, two laptops both perfectly suited for handy tasks.

I asked Joanna, who is now a leading personal technology reporter at WSJ, about all this, who replied: “Let’s be clear here. Apple’s upcoming event this week is actually about netbooks. The iPad Pro is an evolution of the netbook movement a decade ago. “Are you kidding?” I don’t know and she wouldn’t tell me.

Now, of course, there are no netbooks, but everything is a netbook. The iPad is the iPad, with several models in different sizes and prices, and an angry debate going on over whether it can replace a laptop. (See? It’s a netbook.) Chromebooks exist and both Apple and Microsoft worry about them in familiar ways. We are surrounded by cheap, device-like computers that run silly custom interfaces to cloud services over open source operating systems – this is an Echo Show or a Google Chromecast or even an Oculus Quest 2 netbook. Intel is in dire need of reinvention and Windows in itself it is diminished; Microsoft would gladly call its operating system “Azure Edge” if someone went for this type of trip.

Have netbooks ever happened? Netbooks … victory?

Eee, PC. Eee.