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Comment by baldfat | Hacker News Reader

The netbook did change laptops to be smaller and (Windows) cheaper then they were before they came out. I bought my wife an EEE netbook and it was super cheap at $499.

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Since when is $500 "super cheap" for a netbook? The original EEE was ~$250 (depending on Linux or Windows).

Chromebooks are $250 new, with a haswell proc.

Though you can get real Windows laptops for less than that....

EDIT: for whoever downvotes simple statements of fact... Lenovo - Ideapad 100s 11.6" Laptop $199.99; HP - Stream 11.6" Laptop $199.99; New! Dell - Inspiron 11.6" Laptop $199.99. http://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?id=pcat17071&st=l...

Those "real" Windows laptops have smartphone CPUs (and less RAM than recent smartphones, to add insult to injury); and run in the same price spectrum as Chromebooks – there's $200 ARM Chromebooks, too.

Actually useful versions cost around $250+ in both cases.

Which laptop & smartphone CPUs are you talking about?

I haven't kept up with news lately. Could you post some links

Some smartphones surprisingly decent specs.

  1440 x 2560 pixels 
  Quad-core 2.1 GHz Cortex-A57
  3 GB RAM
  32/128 GB SSD
  And 2 cameras / other smartphone features.

But, they cost 2-3x what a netbook does.

New Atom chips are actually quite fast -- certainly they're much faster than the ones in netbooks. Also, Windows 10 runs quite well in 2GB of RAM, for most ordinary purposes.

In my experience, these machines browse faster than Chromebooks, support more tabs (in Firefox), let you use non-Google browsers (eg Vivaldi), and run lots of stuff that Chromebooks don't (eg Microsoft Office, iTunes, etc). They also work much better offline.

You can save a trivial amount of money by buying a cheap Chromebook, but you lose a lot of performance and capability.

I'm not saying that Chromebooks don't have advantages for some use cases, because clearly they do. However, they're not significantly cheaper than comparable Windows 10 laptops, which is where we came in....

Entry level Windows laptops and Chromebooks are competitive on price and specification. OEM Windows licensing is essentially free on these machines. The very cheapest Chromebooks (~$150) undercut the cheapest Windows laptops by using a Rockchip ARM processor, although this limits performance.

Users understand the value proposition of ChromeOS - it is more limited than Windows, but it is more reliable and secure. For many users, this is a very worthwhile tradeoff. Two of the ten best selling laptops on Amazon are Chromebooks.

http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Lap...

The later iterations on the concept were vastly superior to the original Eee and Eee clones. Netbooks in the $500 range typically had dual core Atoms (a big deal since the CPU was the weakest link), 10.1" screens that had a resolution that was actually usable (1280x720 instead of 1024x600), and usable amounts of storage.

That market didn't last very long as hardware costs dropped so quickly that full size, full power laptops suddenly cost the same with the only trade off being battery life.

The original EEE 700 was $399.00 and the 900 was $650. My 700 for my wife had extra memory for $485 or something.

EDIT Reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC

Meh. Subnotebooks were a thing before netbooks and after (until they were killed by cheap ultrabooks), and $250 notebooks faster than the eee crap existed before, if you bothered looking.

To my recollection, you could buy a small laptop or a cheap one, but the combination was almost impossible to find until netbooks came out. Before them, it was the UMPC/Project Origami craze, and they cost $700+.

Even in '09, the cheap subnetbook market was very badly served. I got a 12" HP DV2, but it cost me $500, and that because it was on sale, since it originally retailed for $730.

Toshiba Libretto, Compaq Aero. Ok, that's long ago but those were netbooks in just about every sense of the word.

I'm not sure what exact models you're referring to, but the one's I'm seeing were all $1500-3000 machines.

That's not what I paid for them. Even so, computers back then in general were more expensive than they are today and 'inexpensive' is a fairly relative term for something that you earn your living with. The last one in that formfactor that I bought was an acer aspire one, probably also not a netbook by some definition but extremely convenient (especially with the built in cellular modem).

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