Earlier this month Ars Technica published the first part of their “State of the Netbook” series. The first part covered around 15-20 years prior to 2008/2009.
Yesterday they published part two, aptly named “The State of the Netbook, Part II: The Inevitable Eeeruption” which covers Asustek kick-starting things with their Asus Eee PC line as well the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and Classmate projects, which spurred Asustek into action, along with the Nanobook concepts and Intel’s platforms. The HP 2133 was mentioned for its role in getting VIA into the game.
Ars Technica believes the netbook is here to stay, and their view mirrors that of the great Wired article that gets into how netbooks are something that people want, not something they are necessarily being told they need, and the technology is finally delivering:
Is it possible that, after all this sound and fury, the netbook trend may yet turn out to be a tale told by an idiot?
It seems unlikely. This attempt has escalated into a Greek epic of coordinated technological and economic effort by a huge variety of players. From dedicated processors and chipsets from multiple vendors, to cheap LCD screens and memory to tiny hard disks (and SSDs) capacious and fast enough to store and deliver the media users demand, the technology has arrived, and it is being delivered in a dedicated form, engineered for this wave of devices. This is finally it.
Part III will cover the Intel Atom and how it’s both helped and hurt the PC market in general.
Read: Ars Technica