Slate Magazine has an article on the netbooks trend — a move towards smaller, cheaper and less powerful laptops. A netbook is usually a minimalist laptop, free of the bloatware and resource-heavy OS that my laptop came with (did yours?), with the minimum requirements and maximum portability.
I know I can’t stand typing on a less-than-standard size keyboard, but everything else sounds perfect for computing while traveling.
Minimalism pervades Amazon’s laptop list; over the last few weeks, the
great majority of the 25 best-seller slots have been occupied by
various permutations of the Eee PC and other souped-down, sub-$500
machines. In the computer industry, these miniature computers are known
as “netbooks.” The term is vaguely defined, but the best way to spot a
netbook is to peek at the specs: Today’s bigger laptops run on Intel’s
speedy Core 2 Duo processor, while netbooks use a smaller, less
powerful, and cheaper Intel chip, the Atom. Netbooks also run older or
more lightweight operating systems—generally Windows XP or some flavor
of Linux.PC companies are looking to these machines in much the same way John McCain once looked to the governor of Alaska—as an easy way to put a fresh face on an otherwise aging product line.