{"id":1986,"date":"2009-02-19T16:03:13","date_gmt":"2009-02-19T16:03:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ewanspence.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/19\/of-course-netbook-sales-on-the-rise\/"},"modified":"2009-02-19T16:21:39","modified_gmt":"2009-02-19T16:21:39","slug":"of-course-netbook-sales-on-the-rise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/2009\/02\/of-course-netbook-sales-on-the-rise\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Course Netbook Sales Are On The Rise"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is it any wonder that sales of netbooks are on the rise? The Guardian posted this at the start of the week<\/a> and I\u2019ve had the tab open in Firefox since then to write about this.<\/p>\n

The features race on the regular desktop market has been over for a while. The increases in CPU speed and memory don;t affect the average consumer any more. Storage is one area that is growing given the requirements of digital media, but really we should be teaching people to buy a new hard drive rather than a whole new desktop.<\/p>\n

There will always be people that need extra power \u2013 gamers are one, and editing in video is another, but for normal people as long as it plays music and video, can browse the web, do their email and a touch of word processing, then it\u2019s going to be sufficient for their needs. And there is little argument that netbooks can fulfil this role very nicely.<\/p>\n

(The argument is whether Teklogix are right to sue over the genericisation<\/a> of the name netbook \u2013 in my opinion they missed the boat as long ago as their reverse takeover of Psion).<\/p>\n

The netbooks fit the requirements of many users; the price point (currently \u00a3150-\u00a3250 in the UK) is perfect in these cautious times; and the availability of an Operating System that most normal people trust (Windows XP) means there\u2019s little reason for people to not buy them over a full scale laptop.<\/p>\n

Now the market has spoken, will the manufacturers listen? I think in part they will, but I\u2019d expect them to add in slightly larger screens, memory, etc to try and get the price back up closer to the \u00a3300 so they can make some sort of profit!<\/p>\n

To be honest, I think they\u2019d be better staying with the 8.9\u201d screen models and bundling in a USB keyboard and mouse and a note about hooking it up to an external monitor for a full home PC system.<\/p>\n

Just like I do.<\/p>\n

\"Asus<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is it any wonder that sales of netbooks are on the rise? The Guardian posted this at the start of the week and I\u2019ve had the tab open in Firefox since then to write about this. The features race on the regular desktop market has been over for a while. The increases in CPU speed and memory don;t affect the average consumer any more. Storage is one area that is growing given the requirements of digital media, but really we should be teaching people to buy a new hard drive rather than a whole new desktop. There will always be<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[4,575,111,14],"tags":[484,911,541,500,540,499],"class_list":["post-1986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pocket-computers-and-phones","category-netbook-pocket-computers-and-phones","category-web-20","category-wi-fi-and-the-psion-netbook","tag-asus","tag-desktop","tag-netbook","tag-netbook-remix","tag-psion","tag-ubuntu","comments-off"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p58Gl0-w2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1986\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}