Legal Research

Netbooks, Revisited

Netbooks are all the rage. I’ve blogged about them before. I haven’t followed up on that original post, because most of the articles I’ve been reading are written by propeller heads who argue about cache speeds or screen refresh or some other esoteric thingie that 99.99999999% of computer users do not know or care about. But Wired has a quite interesting article about the Netbook Effect. Here’s one quote that jumped out at me:

“For years now, without anyone really noticing, the PC industry has functioned like a car company selling SUVs: It pushed absurdly powerful machines because the profit margins were high, while customers lapped up the fantasy that they could go off-roading, even though they never did. So coders took advantage of that surplus power to write ever-bulkier applications and operating systems. What netbook makers have done, in effect, is turn back the clock: Their machines perform the way laptops did four years ago. And it turns out that four years ago (more or less) is plenty.”

So true. And even though I have 2 pricey — at least by *my* standards — Macs at home, I am quite fond of my 6 year-old, hand-me-down Dell Inspiron 1100 running CrunchBang linux.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on February 24, 2009 (boomark / email).