Everyday, we hear about netbook manufactures adding more and more features in their netbooks, which is now putting them in the category of low-end notebooks. According to the President of The Information Network, Intel is earning not much from the Atom chips and so is Microsoft. We all already know that the Microsoft sells XP licenses to the netbook manufactures for cheap prices.
Anyway, remember the original concept of netbook? The netbooks were supposed to be:
- cheap
- small
- easy to use
With the numerous addons that the netbook manufactures have started including like bigger displays; bigger keyboards and even DVD burners(!), the word cheap is now out of equation. In fact, some of the top-end netbooks cost more than the entry level notebooks.
In netbooks’ infancy stage, end-users did not see netbooks as media players and full fledge laptops. Now, they do. Why? The reason is simple: people wanted to do much more on these little devices, which the netbooks manucatures like ASUS did not expect to happen. People wanted to see HD video on their netbooks and yearned for bigger screens. This ultimately gave birth to netbooks equipped with bigger screens and huge HDDs. It also made it clear that people want to store a lot on their devices. This decreased the demand for the SSDs as it offered much less storage compared to the HDDs at the same price.
The processing power of the netbooks is now enough to let you see HD content (720p videos can be played easily on almost any netbook). It is only a matter of time that there will be a little difference between the processing power of netbooks and atleast entry level notebooks.
Only few of us had expected that the lines between netbooks and notebooks would get blurred so soon. Consumers want their netbooks to everything and the netbook manufactures are doing everything they can to make the netbook do more and more.
Conclusion: Future looks very bright for the netbook manfactures, but same cannot be said for the only notebook manufactures.
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