Netbooks: People want less, and they want more of it
After years of working in a retail environment, I’m finally seeing something new. My customers are finally starting to realize that they might not need the biggest, baddest system on the market to satisfy their computing needs. Perhaps the best illustration of this trend to date was in full bloom at this years’ CES.
Yes, I’m talking about netbooks. They were all over the place, and while I wasn’t in attendance my RSS feeds were updating constantly with news of some manufacturer’s latest model every couple of minutes.
If you’re a fan of Frugal IT, this is great news. Netbooks and nettops are aggressively priced and provide a computing experience that is, in most cases, on par with other laptop and desktop systems. They’re also extremely quiet (generally speaking) and consume very little energy. Frugal is great, but green and frugal? Sign me up.
I’ve run Windows 7 on my MSI U100. I’ve run Vista Home Premium and Fedora 10 on it, as well. It runs great, even when I’m doing things on it that Asus probably never intended when they released the EEE, like editing images in Photoshop CS4. With the ability to run 2gb of ram and up to a 500gb SATA hard drive, I’ve got plenty of power and flexibility at my disposal.
The segment is exploding right now. Atom sales have been huge for Intel, and will no doubt remain strong in an otherwise sluggish IT market. NVidia’s Ion is out, and will make HD video a possibility on upcoming netbooks. AMD is even getting involved, even though they downplayed the importance of netbooks a while back.
The best part for all of us? Savings. Because of their size and comparatively low (but still sufficient) computing power, most netbooks and nettops we see will be priced under $600US.
When you take everything into consideration – price, reduced noise, energy savings, portability – these machines make good sense in most normal business environments – and that’s a plus for any IT manager who’s been told to trim expenses.
Lee Mathews is a blogger for Download Squad, regular contributor to Liliputing, and big fan of saving money on IT.
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