I still have a 9" EeePC (the Celeron M one) and use it occasionally. It is certainly vastly more useful/usable than my tablet, and only slightly bulkier. I always wanted a 9" netbook with better hardware but it never happened. An Atom / Core i5 tablet + keyboard is similar, minus lots of connectivity, at a far higher price (and Atom is still shit).
Is the end nigh? PC market freefall accelerates.
- Thread starter jimbo75
- Start date
Blazkowicz
Legend
A buddy has the 9" eee PC too (the same but with an Atom instead)
It sure is lovely. It has 4GB + 8GB "SSD" drives, and memory upped to 2GB.
At least you don't fear breaking it almost non existent mechanical parts. Just plug a long ethernet cable and you can access and transfer shit at 10MB/s without dealing with cryptographic keys nor even waiting for the stuff "shaking hands".
BTW the storage puts hard limits on what OS and programs you can run, and whether running Windows XP, with swap, is a good idea. I installed Linux Mint 12 LXDE on it (sadly no later LXDE editions) and it was pretty marvelous, with system on the 4GB drive and user data on the 8GB drive, no swap partition.
It sure is lovely. It has 4GB + 8GB "SSD" drives, and memory upped to 2GB.
At least you don't fear breaking it almost non existent mechanical parts. Just plug a long ethernet cable and you can access and transfer shit at 10MB/s without dealing with cryptographic keys nor even waiting for the stuff "shaking hands".
BTW the storage puts hard limits on what OS and programs you can run, and whether running Windows XP, with swap, is a good idea. I installed Linux Mint 12 LXDE on it (sadly no later LXDE editions) and it was pretty marvelous, with system on the 4GB drive and user data on the 8GB drive, no swap partition.
While I completely disagree with you seeing handheld computing as a fad, I'm totally with you on the upgrade cycle of tablets running out of steam eventually.
I don't see myself ever going back to notebooks for casually surfing the web, quickly checking email, reading forums etc, which covers 90% of my at-home computing. But I don't see myself upgrading anytime soon from an iPad 3 either. The difference between netbooks and tablets is that tablets are at least very good at something. Netbooks only had their low price going for them. For everything else, there are better alternatives.
All my posts here are typed on iPhone/iPad. I only switch to laptop when I need to embed URLs. So, yes, once it goes beyond pure text, I switch to something meatier. I don't see notebooks going away at all. I just don't faster ones than what I have now. I don't think using a netbook is bad in any way: if it has the right trade-ofs for you, then all the better. But the market clearly seems to have decided on this one.Oh I dunno. I like my Eee a lot for web browsing...I alternate between tablet and it for that. If I need to type even a sentence the Eee blows the tablet away.
People like $500 tablets and hate the $250 notebooks.
A $500 tablets does a few things much much better than a $1000 laptop.
A touch based interface is just more intuitive than keyboard or a mouse. Simple as that. Given a choice, people would prefer to do any task with touch than without, as long as it could be done adequately well.
Blazkowicz
Legend
The market began selling 15" laptops only slightly more expensive than netbooks (and netbooks as expensive as those 15 inchers)
With full size laptops at 300 euros/dollars, many people who would have got a netbook as their only computer got those instead.
Then, CPU tech and HDD tech really is slow those days, once you have a netbook you never need to upgrade to a newer one because what better stuff is there exactly? AMD Bobcat obviously but it uses a bit more power and is really seen on 11.6" laptops (and 15 and 17" ones)
It's taken the Cortex A-15 to surpass the Atom, and it's barely out and not x86.
With full size laptops at 300 euros/dollars, many people who would have got a netbook as their only computer got those instead.
Then, CPU tech and HDD tech really is slow those days, once you have a netbook you never need to upgrade to a newer one because what better stuff is there exactly? AMD Bobcat obviously but it uses a bit more power and is really seen on 11.6" laptops (and 15 and 17" ones)
It's taken the Cortex A-15 to surpass the Atom, and it's barely out and not x86.
Blazkowicz
Legend
There's that fantasy of really needing that tablet (as if you were a physician running around in a hospital, consulting vital data and filling simplified forms)
I saw quite a few tablets while watching Star Trek : TNG. In a show dating for the seasons at hand to around 1991!, thin and with the same size as current ones. They don't see much use, though. What's telling is the captain has a sort of thick but small netbook on his desk.
But he seems to only use it for zero-latency videoconference over thousands of light-years (right.. I don't buy this part). Everyone don't seem to care at all about the devices, interestingly it's only the spaceship's big ass computer with female voice that really counts, and they talk to it the vast majority of time (or pretend to do things on the touch consoles)
Note that they don't have and don't need phones, they probably have some kind of implants that capture their voice in some fashion, and ones that send voice directly to their cochlea or brain.
I saw quite a few tablets while watching Star Trek : TNG. In a show dating for the seasons at hand to around 1991!, thin and with the same size as current ones. They don't see much use, though. What's telling is the captain has a sort of thick but small netbook on his desk
.But he seems to only use it for zero-latency videoconference over thousands of light-years (right.. I don't buy this part). Everyone don't seem to care at all about the devices, interestingly it's only the spaceship's big ass computer with female voice that really counts, and they talk to it the vast majority of time (or pretend to do things on the touch consoles)
Note that they don't have and don't need phones, they probably have some kind of implants that capture their voice in some fashion, and ones that send voice directly to their cochlea or brain.
They have comm badges on the front on their uniforms. They use them like 50 times an episode, how could you miss it lol.
The TNG desk terminal reminds me of a ca. 2000 LCD monitor but they use voice input (and a single button). The tablet was called a PADD. It was another type of terminal accessing the ship's computer. Everything was networked into the main computer. Even the personal phasers.
Tablet shipments overtake desktop and laptop combined in the UK -
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/16/uk_tab_versus_pc_q1/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/16/uk_tab_versus_pc_q1/
That's hardly telling. The market is already saturated with PC's while tablets are more or less just starting out. If you were to take away all tablets and PC's currently in the market and then let people start buying and measure sales I'm sure you'd see a very different picture.
Blazkowicz
Legend
How's the market for desktop parts?
I wonder about motherboard sales especially which might be a good proxy for people building their PC.
Many years ago already, people who would have bought a branded, finished desktop were likely to buy a laptop instead and now there's a shift to tablets - though the article says, people just use their laptops longer as well.
It doesn't automatically mean desktops are compromised. Though, there's a bit of a problem when you see how well desktop hardware from say 2009 still performs (both high end and low end of that era)
I think we may see a small desktop and laptop renaissance (or PC renaissance) soon. At least there's some new hardware with Haswell, Richland, next-gen Atom and Jaguar ; Windows 8.1 will buy some confidence too.
I wonder about motherboard sales especially which might be a good proxy for people building their PC.
Many years ago already, people who would have bought a branded, finished desktop were likely to buy a laptop instead and now there's a shift to tablets - though the article says, people just use their laptops longer as well.
It doesn't automatically mean desktops are compromised. Though, there's a bit of a problem when you see how well desktop hardware from say 2009 still performs (both high end and low end of that era)
I think we may see a small desktop and laptop renaissance (or PC renaissance) soon. At least there's some new hardware with Haswell, Richland, next-gen Atom and Jaguar ; Windows 8.1 will buy some confidence too.
UniversalTruth
Veteran
You can look at win 8.1 just as a service pack to win 8 sold in this way for marketing purposes. It is just a trivial update with the weight of a service pack
Silent_Buddha
Legend
8.1 isn't going to be sold. It'll be free to anyone with Windows 8 just like a service pack. By the time it is released, I wouldn't be surprised if it was called Service Pack 1. Although they may stick with Windows 8.1 or Windows Blue to let people know the UI has changed slightly.
Regards,
SB
Regards,
SB
If they fix win8 so there's a start menu and a way to boot straight to the desktop without first passing that idiotic tile interface, I'll buy it for my next PC. There's some good improvements there for sure, but bizarre UI decisions made (by execs without a clue, no doubt) to try and use windows to force/foist their tablet OS on the rest of the planet gimps the entire OS.
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
I think they'll stick to calling it 8.1 as it gives them another bite at marketing a "new" version of Windows. The Win8 launch and sales have been so disastrous they will want to do it again with a (hopefully) fixed version.
UniversalTruth
Veteran
For me it won't be enough if they simply bring the start button (menu ?) back and add the choice whether you wanna boot to the Metro or to the desktop.
I want the original ugly large tiles to be heavily modified. To be smaller and with more modern design, including Aero effects, choice of picture background for the Start menu, etc.
Or in other words- more beautiful graphics-heavy eye candies...
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
I can live with the flat look UI if MS brings back the Start Menu and lets me disable Metro. I'm willing to lose Aero to gain the other Win 8 benefits, but in it's current state, I'm losing much more than I gain with Win8, so I'm skipping it.
Similar threads
