All the boys at CG love them some netbooks – I’m content with my mini-model AKA the iPhone – but apparently the rest of the world is snapping them up as well. Om notes that 17 of the 25 top-selling notebooks on Amazon were sub-$500 netbooks, something I’m sure the laptop manufacturers love.
Think about it: laptop sales were stagnant/falling between 2005 and 2007. Every laptop was a one-off iteration of the last – a little faster, a little bigger, a few more lights. I recall especially an Acer line famous for having blue lights. Not, specifically, a hot update.
Then netbooks came along. You got OLPC – the cute little Valley status symbol – and then the rest of the manufacturers finally figured out what to do with all the low-powered embedded systems they were, or weren’t, selling wholesale: the plopped them into netbooks.
Om said it best: the race to the bottom has begun.